“I joined migrants and refugees long ago. Now I
belong nowhere, birthplace an accident/ ancestors from rain forests in Asia,
Africa, to meet saturated Amazonia.” — Seed Mistress
The Poet’s Press mourns the death of one its star poets,
Jacqueline de Weever, who died in March 2026 after a long illness. The Brooklyn
poet, born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) was educated there and in
New York, earning a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She was Professor
Emerita at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she taught
English Medieval Literature for 29 years. She has published four books in her field: The
Chaucer Name Dictionary (Garland, 1988); Mythmaking and Metaphor in
Black Women’s Fiction (St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Sheba’s Daughters:
Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in French Medieval Epic
(Garland, 1998); and Aesop and the Imprint of Medieval Thought (McFarland,
2011). Her poetry appeared in Blue
Unicorn, The Cape Rock Review, Sensations Magazine, Tiger’s Eye, Tribeca Poetry
Review, and Vanitas, among others. She was also a watercolor painter.
A brief account follows of her works published by
The Poet’s Press, giving some sense of the flavor and content. Far from
vanishing into her medieval studies, de Weever’s poetry ran deep into the
history of the colossal clash of two worlds that underlaid her childhood in
Guyana.
Trailing the Sun’s Sweat (2015) spans
continents and time. Interspersed with quotations from Columbus's journal, de
Weever recounts and visits her native British Guiana as seen by its conquerors
and ravishers, and by its survivors. Rich with the flora and fauna of island
and Amazon, the book poses native against the European’s encounter with the
native. The eyes of the caiman look out from the waters, while a visiting
European artist paints delicate watercolors of butterflies and lush tropical
plants. Some of the poems inhabit the oppressed within our northern borders,
such as Tituba, accused witch of Salem, or the lynched Native American
Jacqueline Peters. In retracing her own heritage and origins, de Weever invites
us to confront the beauty, and violence, of the hemisphere we share.
Jacqueline de Weever’s second poetry collection, Rice-Wine
Ghosts (2017), is again haunted by the flora and fauna of the Western
hemisphere, “the world’s garden, /where poisons hide in glitter,/ soar and dip
of bright wings.” These are poems personal rather than political or polemical,
tracing brilliant moments of encounter with a voluptuous world — the British
Guyana of her childhood, the Caribbean, the Andes, the Amazon, and far, far
off, the Pleiades and the moon. A lemon tree in a Moroccan courtyard,
sunflowers outside Florence, a dash of Japanese rice wine, the indigo blue of
Canton china, a chest full of Ivory Coast batiks. Yet there is also loss: the
survivor of earthquake and tsunami, “desolation stamped in her slow/ stride,
humped shoulders, drooped head,” a search for a remembered star constellation
that refuses to show itself, a state of coma as “death’s high priest … behind
the closed door of your eyelids.” This book is a treasure-trove of voluptuous
imagery and moonlit recollections of beauty, memory, and yearning. The author’s
catalog of tropical flora and fruit makes up her armory: “I hoard/ jungle
flowers/ to warp the hunger/ of the crocodile/ slowly approaching my shore.”
In Seed Mistress (2020), de Weever’s
writing prompted an elegantly-designed book replete with Amazonian animals and foliage.
The first Europeans to visit the Caribbean and the Amazonian realms of South
America were overwhelmed by the profusion of animals and plants, many of them
brightly-colored, unfamiliar in shape, and unknown to the gardener’s or the
chef’s palette. Could you eat it? Would it eat you? Medicine, or poison?
Overlaid with the magic of Inca, Maya, and Aztec, the natural world of our
hemisphere is as rich as all of Europe’s myths, if only one looks and listens. In
this collection, where “dreams excavate my past,” the poet plunges us into a
world of crocodile caimans, howler monkeys, spice trees, boa constrictors, and
armadillos, but just as readily engages with close observations from her own
Brooklyn gardens. This is a voluptuous collection of poems with a voice gently but
affirmatively outside-looking in.
De Weever’s final poetry collection, Waste
Basket Elegies and Plywood Glories, came out in 2023. Writers have
responded in many ways to seeing the cities in which they dwell become places
of crisis and mass mourning. In this somber and elegant collection, Jacqueline
de Weever roams Brooklyn and Manhattan to glean darkness and light as a city
confronts the COVID pandemic. De Weever, as an elder poet and thus among the
most vulnerable New Yorkers, studied the city as architecture and
infrastructure in crisis, as public art blossoming out of stress and darkness,
and as a mask over the never-ending struggle for justice against violence. Amid
a masked and boarded-up New York, the poet found unexpected bursts of hope in
the streets, and has revealed them here in terse and understated poems, like
watercolors of a near-Apocalypse, or a butterfly at the edge of a volcanic
crater.
In a prefatory page, the poet writes: “Anguish
floated on the breezes blowing through New York City as we tried desperately to
keep ourselves alive. Some of us awoke to the sight of refrigerated trucks
waiting outside hospitals to receive the dead. In upper Manhattan, some awoke
to ‘Flower Flash,’ installations donated by Lewis Miller Designs. Black trash
baskets, old telephone booths, subway entrances appeared stuffed or garlanded
with flowers. The florist’s night work became altars of mourning and remembrance.”
