W. S. Merwin (1927–2019)

Give this collection a few pages before you discover the understated eloquence of age and loss and love in the face of it all. While this is not his finest collection, Merwin offers us his truth with language that is accessible to those who do not regularly read poetry. Yet many of the poems have depth of thought and feeling and a koan kind of craft that belies what seems prosaic at first reading. I highly recommend it whether you are in the last third of life or just beginning your too show more short journey. Poetry like Merwin's helps us all to pay close attention both to the questions and to the only answers in the now. show less

The old saying goes when in Rome, do as the Romans do. That may still hold true, but when I’m in Paris, I include a stop at Shakespeare and Company, the legendary bookstore close to the Seine. It’s no longer located where Sylvia Beach hosted Pound, Joyce, and a host of others, but it’s close enough (and you can browse through some of her own old books upstairs).
Negotiating the narrow aisles filled with other book-lovers takes some patience, as does finding what one is looking for along show more the crowded shelves. But on my latest venture there, I managed to find what I sought, a book on the history of Paris, and then — serendipity of serendipities — I found something I wasn’t looking for. Slightly disoriented, I found myself in the deepest recess of the shop, devoted to poetry. I wasn’t in the market for any, and if I were to purchase one, how to select? In the end, I think this book found me. My eyes roved the room, slightly dazed, then rested on the name Merwin printed in white letters on a black spine. A half-century ago, when I read a lot of poetry, he was one I read.
So I walked out of the store with two books.
This volume collects poems from throughout Merwin’s prolific career and is a good place to start reading him. From the aspiring young poet who wrote the carefully-structured and richly allusive “Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge,” to the poet who abandoned punctuation, which opened the possibility of a variety of readings, depending on how one combined adjacent words in one’s head. He soon employed this looser technique in vitriolic protest against war and environmental destruction, then lived long enough to use it to convey the poignancy and confusion of aging.
Along the way, there were recurring themes. One was the sense of irrevocable loss we’re inflicting on the planet. His prose-poem “Unchopping a Tree“ is no less urgent now, as fires devastate the rain forest than when it was written. Another is the fluidity of identity. In a variety of ways, the poet voices the feeling of being a stranger in familiar surroundings, ever on the verge of taking leave. Above all, there is Merwin’s fascination with language. Speaking not of himself, but of departed contemporary poets he admired, he writes: “the clear note they were hearing never promised anything but the true sound of brevity that will go on after me” (“Lament for the Makers”). Language is inexorably tied to existence, yet Merwin seems to be on a self-defeating quest: that even if one could hone language with precision — a daunting task, always out of reach — it would do nothing but depict transience and document our mutual incomprehension. Yet the struggle yields wonderful, life-affirming results.
Merwin is an elegist of the elusive, of that which is glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. At the same time, he somehow manages to convey a sense of timelessness.
I try to reserve a five-star rating for books that are not only excellent examples of their genre but that I feel everyone should read. I hesitated with this, knowing that even among the small tribe of readers, those who read poetry are a tiny subset. But I’m so high on this book I can’t give it less than five. Here’s a suggestion: take it off the shelf at a nearby bookstore or library, try just one, “Wild Oats,” for instance — or even the poem printed on the back cover, “Noah’s Raven.” I bought the book on the strength of that one poem; it was a good purchase. show less

This review was written in September 2016. I've reread the collection three times since, the last time upon learning of Merwin's death in March 2019.

In part dictated to his wife Paula when he was losing his eyesight, William Stanley Merwin’s new book of poetry is a heartbreaking elegy to the evanescence of life, a celebration of a life lived through love, and a bittersweet journey into the world of darkness from the world of light and books.

Who knows, maybe Merwin, who turns 89 later this show more month (on 30 September), will have more poems to give us still, but reading this book is like reading his farewell. From a man who has been remarkably consistent in his art, and even in the company of his award-winning The Shadow of Sirius (2008) and the collected Migration (2004), his latest collection, Garden Time (2016) might be his most breathtaking work yet. In its 96 pages and 61 poems, starting with "The Morning" (which could just as well be "The Mourning" it sounds alike when read aloud), he lets us enter the titular garden, their garden, the place of comfort, quietude, peace and inspiration for him, as if he was saying his last goodbyes to it. And by the time we leave with the last poem, "The Present", we have realized that for him, those images and memories are a goodbye already due to the loss of his eyesight. “I forget that,” as he writes in "December Morning,"

I am almost blind and I see the piles
of books I was going to read next
there they wait like statues of sitting dogs
faithful to someone they used to know
but happiness has a shape made of air
it was never owned by anyone
it comes when it will in its own time

Merwin’s poetry has always celebrated the here and now with great dignity and admiration, but here his poems have added significance, as a man at the end of his life sits down to write about its beauty - the moment that is forgotten, regardless of the yearning to grasp it, cling to it and remember it forever; that the happiness of the moment wishes to be remembered, only to join the river of our passing through this world, not for us to own but glance and let go.

19 September,
2016 show less

Merwin was born 30 September 1927, and died in March 2019. I first encountered his poetry in 2010, after seeing him in a documentary about the life of the Buddha. His even-tempered, self-deprecating way of puncturing the Deadly Seriousness of the other talking heads in the film was memorable; his poetic voice had to be as lovely, right?

Um. Rain in the Trees didn't wow me. It's from the 1980s sometime, and permaybehaps forty years of poeting had worn him down. It wasn't for me, as the polite show more formulation of "what the actual FUCK *is* this crapola anyway?!?" is phrased.

He died; I ran across that fact on Wikipedia; connected him with the nice old buffer in the Buddha thing and ILL'd this 1967 collection of Vietnam War-era stuff. It's a darn good thing I did. THIS poetry I like! Here is where the fortysomething poet whose professional life was contemporaneous with Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, and Denise Levertov (all friends of his) and the Beats (not friends of his), those slashers-and-burners of whatever rules there were at that point, were working.

Merwin wasn't going to be a Beat, they were too raucous for him. He got Pulitzers (twice!) for poetry, he was the United States Poet Laureate, he translated Neruda, he translated Euripides, he translated Gawain and the Green Knight in 2002; he was a busy professional poet. His legacy will last a while longer, though I doubt he'll be as enduringly popular as Seamus Heaney or Neruda...not enough there, there...and he will find his way into anthologies for a while after that.

But this collection, second that I've read, is worthy of your eyeblinks. It says something deeply meaningful in a personal yet relatable way. Merwin wasn't a groundbreaking iconoclast, and some of his early stuff I've run across was so pretentious and self-important that I am amazed the same man wrote it as wrote these poems. His later stuff was, well, in a word it was tired. Overworked the vein, it collapsed. But this? Prime-of-life, peak-of-powers poetical punditry. Every poems means something, both on its surface and on its interior. Read a poem one way, it's pretty; read it another, it's shattering.

The thing that makes this book so lovely is that it includes a dozen or so facsimiles of Merwin's hand-written or typed manuscript pages, some on glossy photo paper and two printed inside the paper cover, that really bring the reader into Merwin's emotional orbit. Seeing the pages that he composed his thoughts on makes the typeset version of the poem that much more meaningful. His presence, albeit in mechanically reproduced form, is *there* and that causes no small amount of spiritual-connection thrums through my non-poetical soul. show less