Garden Time

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 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.

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 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 show more 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

This slim volume of Merwin's work contains certain gems. I was struck by "The Sound of It," a poem lamenting (or maybe just remarking) on the fact that the stopping of a dog's bark or a day's rain is not itself heard, but rather only the silence or what replaces it, or what was always there that the bark or rain caused us not to attend. Also by the ultimate poem, "The Present," in which two leaving the garden nevertheless simultaneously reach for a senseless gift neither can keep, but laugh when their hands strike each other while so reaching.

That said, the poems in the second half of the book devolved into a murkiness, in which Merwin largely lost the power of the specific and tangible image and instead noodles in a kind of haze show more thanking his lucky stars for his late-in-life love or remarking with wonder on his old age. Neither the love nor his old age are presented vividly, so the effect is largely maudlin. show less

Merwin writes with calm observance of memory and mortality. (Brian)

I love him