one the sleep in the same current of
each waking to you
Mr. Merwin, as the foregoing quotations suggest, has all the equipment of a poet, but
for the moment he appears to write from habit rather than impulse, with the result that
his poems have the reliable effect of remembered gestures and are not above being praised
for their craftsmanship. A poem about a stray dog and one about John Berryman, stand out
as interesting subjects of which the poet has cared to make something. But these read like
prose sketches, without being as well written as good prose. Perhaps the chief difficulty
Mr. Merwin faces at this stage of his career is an uncertainty about motive. He writes a
great deal, and has too much confidence to worry about his occasion. Self-confidence may
of course give reason enough for writing about anything, but complete freedom and complete
listlessness have always looked disturbingly alike.
from New York Times (Oct. 9, 1983). Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company.
Online Source
Edward Hirsch
from "Bleak Visions"
Review of Selected Poems
W. S. Merwin is our strongest poet of silence and doubt, vacancy and absence, deprival
and dispossession. As he put it in his poem ”Teachers”: ”What I live for I can seldom
believe in / who I love I cannot go to / what I hope is always divided.” He is a master
of erasures and negations, a visionary of discomfort and reproof, the Samuel Beckett of
postwar American poetry.
Mr. Merwin has gone through several sea changes in his work over the past four decades.
He began in the 1950’s with a Poundian reading list and a graceful style reminiscent of
Robert Graves, a gift for elaborate orna-mentation and traditional meters. In the 60’s and
early 70’s he radically stripped down his style, dropping punctuation and creating a
compelling quasi-Surrealist imagery and vocabulary of darkness and loss. The poet of
urbanity and wit became a cryptic visionary of the void, an anguished prophet of
apocalypse. In the latter part of the 70’s and throughout the 80’s he has continued as a
poet of ghostly negativities while slowly embracing a dream of pastoral or ecological
wholeness.
Mr. Merwin’s ”Selected Poems” brings together work from 10 books published between
1952 and 1983. There are only five poems from his first two books -”A Mask for Janus”
(1952) and ”The Dancing Bears” (1954) – and consequently his diligent apprenticeship is
scantily represented. His mature work commences with ”Green With Beasts” (1956) and
”The Drunk in the Furnace” (1960). Increasingly the poet’s mythic density and opulent
sense of traditional form belies an underlying uneasiness that ”We know we live between
greater commotions / Than any we can describe.”
The early work culminates in poems where Mr. Merwin describes the coal-mining region of
Pennsylvania. In these family mythologies he memorializes the stubborn inhabitants of a
forlorn country, old people such as his grandparents dying in an ”abandoned land in the
punished / North.” These blank verse poems also point forward by signaling a new
stylistic restlessness, a prodigious sense of human emptiness and loss. ”The Moving
Target” (1963) and ”The Lice” (1967) were two of the most influential poetry books of
the 60’s; they are arguably Mr. Merwin’s two most forceful and focused books. Everything
in them is written under the sign of ”a coming extinction.” His work has always had an
ecological consciousness, but these poems explicitly take up our desperate vulnerability
and our plight as a species, our relentless drive to exterminate ourselves and our
environment. One poem begins: ”My friends without shields walk on the target.” Another
ends: We are the echo of the future On the door it says what to do to survive But we were
not born to survive Only to live.
The voice in these poems seems inscribed on the wind – it echoes with little hope.
Stylistically, these poems – as well as the poems in ”The Carrier of Ladders” (1970)
and ”Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment” (1973) – are associatively, rather than
narratively, organized. They distrust language and resonate with mythic overtones. They
also have a peculiar quality of anonymity and impersonality – as if the void had inhabited
them. One feels primarily the guilt and shame of being human, our complicity in
destruction. Some are accusatory, misanthropic parables. ”The Chaff” begins: ”Those who
cannot love the heavens or the earth / beaten from the heavens and the earth / eat each
other.” These poems use the language of riddle and parable to denounce modernity and
imperialism, what Mr. Merwin views as the apparent death wish of Western civilization.
Yet in ”The Compass Flower” (1977) and ”Opening the Hand” (1983), one detects a
more celebratory and optimistic turn, a new sense of beginning. The poems are concerned
not only with what to renounce in the metropolis but also what to preserve in the country.
This gradual drift continues in Mr. Merwin’s new book, ”The Rain in the Trees.” To be
sure, about half of the poems in this book are fiercely moral parables of denunciation
directed at an undifferentiated ”them” – all those who cut down sacred forests and
develop the land, who trample native cultures and ruin the environment, who believe that
”nothing is real / until it can be sold.” But these poems of didactic rage are balanced
by others that immerse themselves in nature with a fresh sense of numinousness. They are
alive with the sound of rain in the trees, with beholding ”the ripeness of the lucid
air.” They radiate outward with an enlarged sense of the fullness of being and an
original experience beyond language. ”The First Year” begins: When the words had all
been used for other things we saw the first day begin.
In ”The Rain in the Trees” W. S. Merwin becomes a poet who not only traces the dark
night of our collective soul, but also welcomes the morning afterward.
from New York Times (July 31, 1988). Copyright 1999 The New York Times
Company. Online Source
Tom Sleigh
from "Now, Voyagers"
Review of Travels
Sturdily written, extraordinarily entertaining as tales, the best poems in W. S.
Merwin’s "Travels" concern displaced characters made and maimed by their quests’
contradictions: itinerant naturalists working among native populations; a European rubber
tapper who becomes a shaman; Rimbaud at 21, poetry behind him, wandering through Europe
and along the slave routes of Africa; two American Indian artists, one dying on the
reservation, the other escaping only to die in battle, hopelessly outnumbered by white
soldiers. This eccentric gallery of portraits and dramatic monologues provides the poet
with subjects rich in human incident and historical reflection. Such material could have
degenerated into predictable political allegory (imperialism is bad!) or become
somnambulant run-throughs of Browningesque winks and nudges. But Mr. Merwin’s style — his
reticent, self-denying, coolly prophetic blend of Romantic rhetoric and natural
description — transports the subjects into the realm of legend and myth.
Cinchona, the name of a Peruvian tree whose bark can cure fever, becomes transformed in
one poem into a sort of infernal Holy Grail of European empire, the Dutch transporting
seedlings to Java while the English attempt to do the same in India. The beginning of the
poem conjures a cabalistic sense of futurity, a chain linking the blood of humanity with
the fever produced by the anopheles mosquito and with the red bark of the tree named after
the Countess of Chinchon, a Peruvian viceroy’s wife cured of fever by the tree. Each link
of the chain is spookily prophetic of the others, as if behind human history lurked a
sinister design, Robert Frost’s dewdrop spider spinning minute occurrences into a web of
inescapable consequences: "but fever could there be none nor night sweats / numbered
agues aestivo-autumnal chills . . . until the blood was there to bear them." The
archaic flavor of "numbered agues," the Latinate "aestivo," the parody
of Old Testament prophecy in "but fever could there be none," lift the poem into
an empyrean far beyond its dusty sources in a university library.
"Travels" — which makes exemplary use of syllable count; of syntactical
ambiguity in enjambment; of stanzas that rhyme on the same end-sound to produce a
haunting, chantlike intensity; and of that most traditional and difficult device, the art
of telling a good story — represents Mr. Merwin doing superbly well what much
contemporary poetry attempts to do, but fails. He reveals, with great formal intelligence,
the eerie interconnectedness of evil and the minutiae of our day-to-day lives.
from New York Times (May 23, 1993). Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company.
Online Source