“In 2009 Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this beautiful volume of poems . Wisely, without bitterness, these poems capture that essential stillness. In his best book in a decade and one of the best outright Merwin points his oracular, unpunctuated poems toward his own past, admitting, “I have only what I remember”, and offering what may be his most personal, generous and empathic collection. Somehow, he manages to dissolve the boundaries between one time and another, seeming to look forward to the past or remember what has yet to happen, as in a recollection of traveling to Europe by boat and seeing a warship I recognized/ from a model of it I had made/ when I was a child/ and beyond it/ there was a road down the cliff/ that I would descend some years later/ and recognize it/ there we were all together/ one time. The poems show the marks of having weathered ...the complete course/ of life, but also feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom: the morning is too/ beautiful to be anything else. Gorgeous poems about enduring love melt time as well, looking toward a moment when we will be no older than we ever were. These are among Merwins best poems, because, as he says, it is the late poems/ that are made of words/ that have come the whole way/ they have been there. Two of Merwin’s poems will be the subject for discussion during the October Faculty/Staff Poetry Circle meeting.
Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”
NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009.
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