The Shadow of Sirius (2008)

I showed the interview of Merwin with Bill Moyers to my creative writing class and became inspired to buy a copy of this collection, which Merwin frequently read from during the interview.

The poems are exactly the kind I love to read – simple, straightforward with some surprising and highly pleasing insights. I will buy some more of his verse as I come across them. Considering the fact that he has published almost 30 volumes, I can’t bust my budget to complete the collection as I would like to do.

As is my custom when reading a volume of poetry, I mark ones I especially love for quoting here. I marked about 20 in Shadow, so I had a hard time figuring which I would quote. “Cold Spring Morning” kept popping up, so here it is:

“At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below
but the self has no age
as I knew even then and had known
for longer than I could remember
as the sky has no sky
except itself this white morning in May
with fog hiding the barns
that are empty now and hiding the mossed
limbs of gnarled walnut trees and the green
pastures unfurled along the slope
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go” (82).

I felt myself in this poem as I recalled that day back in 1993 when I moved to Texas – alone, knowing not a soul at the age of 45. If I can write one poem this wonderful, this powerful, and so full of truth – not only for me, but for some stranger who happens to read it, then I will be allowed to consider myself a poet.

You need to read Merwin. Over and over, and again and again. 5 stars

--Jim, 4/16/11 ( )

Poems without punctuation giving them a nebulous quality to fit with haunting poems about timelessness and the unfathomable unknowing unknown inhabited by the the lone lost questioner.
Six poems I particularly liked were "Raiment", "Inheritance", "Youth", "Recognition", "My Hand", and
"One of the Butterflies". ( )

I have been reading Merwin since "The Lice," "The Carrier of Ladders," and "The First Four Books of Poems" -- since about 1974. No review can do justice to half a lifetime of reading, despite what reviewers continuously imply.

But there is increasingly a chill in Merwin, a kind of persistent, deep in the bones kind of cold. "The Lice" also had sharp edges, scraps and shards of images, and the poems were as if read by an uneven voice. They fluctuated from astonishingly lucent to weirdly opaque.

His newer work is like a diffuse deep luminous fog. It is lovely, but textureless. Its surface is crossed by small brittle waves, worrying themselves over damp sand (that's partly from one of his images): he is reliably slightly troubled, and unconsolably deeply wounded, but also, sadly for his readers, at peace. After a while, reading the new Merwin, I feel cold, as if I have been walking too long on a foggy seashore. So I might, finally, after over thirty years, stop buying his books. ( )

I heard an interview with Mr. Merwin on NPR and happened to find his book on the shelves of my library later that same day. I am not a great fan of poetry, but I found myself particularly liking several of the poems in this book. ( )

my favorite poet continues to amaze. ( )