Anne Winters

Anne Winters Poems

Anne Winters Biography

Anne Winters is the author of The Key to the City (1986), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Displaced of Capital (2004), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her poems address issues of poverty, homelessness, social inequality, and the city of New York. Dan Chiasson described her poems as “Miltonic, Marxist, ornate, and indignant,” adding that “her real subject is finally how the loveliness of craft measures experience at its most brute and awful, and how experience ruptures even the loveliest of craft.” Concerning The Displaced of Capital, Ellen Nussbaum wrote that Winters “builds legacies to urban poverty that balance between lyricism and manifesto.” Winters is fluent in French, and her translations include Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau (1979). She has traveled widely in Europe and was a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France. Her awards include grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.)

The Best Poem Of Anne Winters

The Armada

Through the meridian's fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging
in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails
that beat the ground before them as they crawl.

Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh
to lean from the curving bows, to trail
their fingertips in the water . . .

All alone on the landmass, the Ship's Artist simply draws what he sees:
red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet
and fish with weeping human faces. The sonic boom arrives at his feet

in the palest ripples. In the painting, Gloriana rides under arms
towards Tilbury Town. Her profile shimmers in the sodium lights
that seem to cast no shadows before or behind her.

Like compass pencils of light, their fingertips spread out
the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae.
Orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor.

Now under radar they study the green road glowing
and add a late-rising moon. The sea so full of maprooms, and the cliffs
chalked with weaponry symbols, trailing the phosphorescence of minesquads.

Only the grassblown Norman ringmounds go on dreaming
of Monet picture hats and streaming scarves,
the bunker disguised as a picnic, that went on forever.

Now the Cathedral at Bayeux, with its window and views, is rolled up
and the Conqueror's navy on its blue worsted waves
and Hengist and Horsa, the Escorial with its green shoals of ships, all are safely rolled up.

Behind the Atlantic Wall, that Rommel called "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land," the white-and-liver-cows
moo through the milky light. The human faces carved
on Norman beams face out to the sea, which has grown

this answering forest of rigging. And very soon, just as soon
as the sea can see the land and the land the sea
the two of them will go to war.

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