In "Painting the Christmas Trees," Joe Weil explores the meaning of neighborhood, both its rootedness and its transience in terms of the port city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in which he was formed as a poet. His work mixes different registers of language, from the Rust Belt working class speech of his family and friends to the poetic influences of his first reading: Roethke, Williams, Stevens, and Yeats. His Irish Catholic working class upbringing instills his poetry with a sense of communion. The poems in this book are anchored to the loss and the brio of people he has known and worked among...

The Plumber's Apprentice differs from Weil's previous work in that it charts the nature of suffering beyond the limits of his working class -Elizabeth- and focuses more deeply on two aspects of his life: his Irish Catholic sense of communion, with the living and the dead (all who have gone forth marked with the sign of faith), and the essential solitude of being a single, short, bald man who has no offspring, no legacy, no beloved, and is falling, however slowly, to his death. Perhaps the question Weil asks most frequently is: given the inevitable co-ordinates of ongoing failure, how does a...