Multitudes: Poems Selected & New

The poems of Multitudes comprise an African-American opera of towering ambition and scope: there are arias and recitatives, whispers and shouts, growls and coos, formal interludes and symphonic improvisation, all set within a revelatory social and cultural context.It is difficult to speak of a poet like Weaver, whose gift is large, lush, and expansive. The difficulty is multiplied when considering a Selected Poems, where the magnitude and range of the poet's accomplishments are fully displayed. One could spend a good deal of time merely on the works of lyrical intensity, such as Weaver's series of poems Lamentations which explores the painful permutations of a father's illness and a mother's death. One could marvel over the compressed emotion this series somehow manages to contain and, in the end, to release in the reader.But this would be to ignore the sharply etched portrait poems, such as Sub Shop Girl, Bootleg Whiskey, and Walnut Cinema. It would not fully explain the straightforwa