Books by W.S. Merwin
Books by W.S. Merwin
by J. Zimmerman.
Poetry.
Prose.
Translation.
Anthology.
Books of Poetry by W.S. Merwin
Books of Prose by W.S. Merwin
- The Mays of Ventadorn.
- The Lost Upland.
- Regions of Memory.
- Unframed Originals.
- Houses and Travelers.
- The Miner's Pale Children.
Books of Translation by W.S. Merwin
Anthology by W.S. Merwin
The Books of Poetry
The Shadow of Sirius (2008)
- Three sections: the third is the strongest; the first section is slow-going.
- Most poems are elegiac.
- Favorite poems (pages in first-edition hard-bound book from Copper Canyon Press):
- p. 36: "A Note from the Cimmerians"
- p. 52: "Trail Marker"
- p. 85: "Youth of Grass"
- p. 100: "Shadow Hand"
- p. 110: "A Momentary Creed". The mild formalism of this poem increases the pleasure of reading it:
couplet.
- The stream-of-consciousness-babble-without-punctuation (as in his recent books)
makes the work often ambiguous so that the reader has to re-read.
Careful reading and rereading for pleasure is great.
Rereading because the poem is deliberately confusing is irritating.
- So many gerunds that they become noticeable, and distract from some poems.
Present Company (2005)
by W.S. Merwin.
Publisher
Copper Canyon Press.
Migration (2005)
by W.S. Merwin.
Publisher
Copper Canyon Press.
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The Pupil (2001)
by W.S. Merwin.
The dark cover picture is the pupil (contractible opening) of an eye.
Superimposed on the center of this is small circular photo supplied by the author
and
presumably of himself as a child.
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When one can hear Merwin read these poems, one has the double pleasure of hearing his voice and
of hearing the cadences that he imposes on his unpunctuated poems.
As with many of his books, I must restart several of the poems the first time I read them.
Nonetheless ... worth taking time with these poems that presage his leave-taking of the
world, first by forgetting and second by not being here.
Among my favorites are "Sonnet" (p.5):
Where it begins will remain a question
for the time being at least ...
...
come back I say to it over the waters
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and the magical
"Marfa Lights" (pp.11-13):
... there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for
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Other favorites are:
"Aliens" (p.25),
"Unspoken Greeting" (p.28),
"Unknown Bird" (pp.36-37),
"First of June" (p.50),
"The Fence" (p.73),
"Heights" (p.90),
"Aliens" (p.25),
"Aliens" (p.25),
"Aliens" (p.25),
"Aliens" (p.25),
Some of these poems were previously published in:
- The American Poetry Review
- The Atlantic
- The Boston Review
- The Hudson Review
- The Kenyon Review
- Literary Imagination
- Metre
- The New York Review of Books
- The New Yorker
- Painted Leaf Press
- The Paris Review
- The Partisan Review
- Poetry
- Shenandoah
- Slate
- Southern California Anthology
- Tabla
The River Sound (1999)
by W.S. Merwin.
The Folding Cliffs (1998)
by W.S. Merwin.
Travels offers 45 poems in 137 pages (thus averaging the rather large 3 pages per poem).
The poems are mostly persona poems. The notes identify six historical figures, including
"David Douglas, 1799-1834, Scottish naturalist for whom the Douglas Fir is named, fell into a
bull trap on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and was killed by a trapped bull."
One of my favorite poems is "Writing Lives" (p.9-10):
Out of a life it is done
and without ever knowing
how things will turn out
or what a life is for that matter
...
one way with the words is to tell
the lives of others
using the distance as a lens
and another way
is when there is no distance
so that water
is looking at water
. . .
there is still that light in the water
before sunrise
the untold day
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Curiously part of this chimes with something in "After the Spring" (p.137):
faces of water turning into themselves
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Other poems have phrases that are recognizably thumbprints of Merwin,
and many of of them relate to time, including:
"no longer",
"come the day",
"for by then it was already".
I prefer to hear Merwin read than to read his unpunctuated poems.
On the whole Merwin's style of omitting all punctuation works better for his half-page poems
than his very long pieces.
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The Peacock's Egg: Love Poems form Ancient India (1981)
by W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson.
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Helpful 35-page Introduction by the scholar and Sanskrit expert J. Moussaieff Masson.
Other Books
The First Four Books (2000).
Flower & Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 (1997).
The Vixen (1996).
The Second Four Books (1993).
[The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target / The Lice / The Carrier of Ladders / Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment.]
Selected Poems (1988).
The Rain in the Trees (1988).
The Opening Hand (1983).
Finding the Islands (1982).
The Compass Flower (1977).
Writing to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973).
Carrier of Ladders (1970).
Won Pulitzer Prize.
The Lice (1967).
The Moving Target (1963).
The Drunk in the Furnace (1960).
Green with Beasts (1956).
The Dancing Bears (1954).
A Mask for Janus (1952).
The Books of Translation
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Purgatorio
by Dante,
translated by W.S. Merwin.
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Links
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