W. S. Merwin Books

W. S. Merwin just goes on making these beautiful poems that sing of the journey of self into Self, past into present, love into the sublime. He speaks with an individual voice that calls forth our collective voice. These poems are archetypal and personal...the best you can hope to find.

W. S. Merwin has had a long time to develop his unique style of writing. And it's not the average lyricism that draws one to him as a poet; it's the haunting flow of the human voice that lies behind not only the structure of each poem but the meter as well. You won't find any punctuation in this book. Merwin lends us no helpful guide to reading. Unless you're tuned in to the flow of person-speak, it's going to be hard to comes to grips with what he's trying to accomplish. Besides his abilities at form, Merwin also gives us his long autobiographical poem "Testimony." "Lament for the Makers" is a medium length poem describing his poetical influences throughout his life. And since "A Mask for Janus" Merwin has been delighting us with his individualized sense of the poetic. He has not failed us with "The River Sound."

.... William Merwin opens "The River Sound" with songs of praise for the natural world in that familiar voice: his fluid, sonorous blend of elegy and ecstasy, sometimes tinged with bitterness about the earth's degradation at human hands. Like his earlier poems, these rejoice in beginnings--dawns, the freshly wakened spirit, "April with the first light sifting/ through the young leaves," the Hudson River before British explorers arrived. Then Merwin turns his attention to history and aging. As he contemplates the past that shaped him, the people and events he has known begin to resemble "the ancient shaping of water/ to which the light of an hour comes back as to a secret." It seems that the poet of mornings has made a new, personal peace with history and change.

The book is a dazzling collection of poems, wise and playful. "Lament for the Makers" is a series of affectionate, quirky eulogies for poets who influenced Merwin and who died during his lifetime, and a confession of his tendency to see himself (partly because of his early rise to literary fame) as "the youngest on the block." This self-image lasted, he wryly admits, long after "the notes in some anthology/ listed persons born after me." The glorious heart of the book is the moving 60-page "Testimony," a leisurely, often funny family history about reaching an age when "the open unrepeatable/ present in which [we] wake and live" becomes "a still life still alive": at last we "know/ what to do with it." The poet ends "Testimony" by bequeathing treasures (a walk shared, a river heard together, a whole Manhattan city block) to each of his life's companions.

Merwin's sentences often run together without punctuation but (as in other work) not merely to echo the rivers, the music, or the sympathetic imagination winding through his pages. His stream of language invites readers inside it as collaborators in its syntax, listening for the sounds of the phrases in the mind's mouth. This intimate sharing of speech is just one of the great pleasures of "The River Sound," written by a premier American poet at the pinnacle of his craft.

One of the greatest books compiled in poetry, Merwin's First Four includes what I believe is one of our most special manuscripts, and that special one would be The Dancing Bears. If you are at all interested in poetry, this is where you should start if you would like a guideline for good taste and well honed syntax. Merwin represents the naturalist and the philosopher as much as Walt Whitman did but with less flare. This stuff is not as formal as some would have you believe, and it is home to some of his best poetry, including more than one of many anthology poems. Do not be scared to purchase.

Mystical, inspiring, and it's a shame he would win the pulitzer with The Carrier Of Ladders, from the second four, because it is not nearly as well written, meaningful, nor structured or progressive. I take after this Poet very much and when I am as such I will pay homage to these somewhat forgotten masters, though, this one lives still, in Hawaii, at this date in time, so don't forget: Poets used to be in the forefront of society, and now that we are all but shadows, time will have its day o'er night, fortress of the star a gift we hold bright, blinded is the fool that wrings to wash, words are but ornaments as delicate frost, serration of all spirit and doom, ragnorak instilled in Shiva's surreptitious tomb, reborn in rainbow spectrums and the swift motion of a cipher's axe, tremble tremble at the foot of Merwin's white meadow intact, poeisis for this celebration cerebral, dancing through eternities of contumely rewrites, belly-up bears are bouncing dusk and bountiful twilight.

This is very hard to get into unless you're familiar with Merwin's more contemporary works.

In this volume of his first four poetry books, he explores themes familiar to us all: love, animals, folk tales, themes in nature, rivers, and death.

His poems are almost all uniquely consistent with the same voice; there is none of the rising up and swelling of other poets, no rhythm to speak of, and one gets the hint that Merwin should've been writing without punctuation at all from the very beginning. He startles you on occassion with his unique insights (White Goat, White Rain) and his great sense of being there in the moment.

I think if you like his contemporary poems, then you should try to read this. They're kinda hard to get into. But otherwise a great showing from a great master.

Yes, this book is like a flower in my hand. W. S. Merwin is a master of subtle emotions using mostly images to communicate his meanings. He doesn't hit you over the head with importance, but you get the importance of his poems anyway, if you read and listen carefully. He is very delicate with his words and precise. I highly recommend this book to any one who enjoys poetry.

This book is composed of reprints of earlier volumes--as many of Merwin's volumes are now being combined and republished. The poems are beautiful and thought-provoking. Best are the poems from "The Compass Flower"--some of love, some of nature. A master poet.

How does one write critically about the abundant beauty of the poetry of W.S. Merwin? Long acclaimed as one of our most poignant and important poets, his newest collection is an endless stream of homages to fleeting thoughts, ideas, and other delicacies encounter by the informed eye and heart. Merwin keeps his language simple but continues to prod our senses with challenging concepts. In these one hundred odd poems he wanders through our perceptions and imaginations and strikes chords familiar and foreign, all with the flowing beauty of his carefully molded words.

These poems seem to be odes, not so much to people as to natural matters and objects and notions. In 'To a Falling Leaf in Winter': 'At sundown when a day's words/ have gathered at the feet of the trees/ lining up in silence/ to enter the long corridors/ of the roots into which they/ pass one by one thinking/ that they remember the place/ as they fell themselves climbing/ away from their only sound/ while they are being forgotten/ by their bright circumstances/ they rise through all the rings/ listening again/ afterward as they/ listened once and they come/ to where the leaves used to live/ during their lives but have gone now/ and they too take the next step/ beyond the reach of meaning.'

There are no adequate descriptives for Merwin's gifts. They are simply there for the savouring of those with quiet hearts to read and hear. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, October 05

Recovering from painful surgery, I read and reread W.S. Merwin's Present Company and was rewarded with solace, total honesty, beauty, lucidity, gracefulness, pathos. This is a book of lyric masterpieces by a master poet at the peak of his visionary, humane powers. There are too many poems to quote here. Among my favorites: To My Legs, To My Mother, To My Grandfathers, To Aunt Margie, To the Old, To the Long Table, To Forgetting, To the Gods, To the Sorrow String." Read them all and be reminded of the vast, magical power of truly great poetry. Find yourself changed -- and weeping.

My husband used to read me this book when I was pregnant with my only child. The sound of the poems made her kick. Maybe the poems, but probably it was just the way he read them--in spanish--louder than he ever said anything. My husband never yelled, even when he was angry he just stayed by himself a bit, but he really used to get into these poems. From his childhood, I guess. He tried to translate them himself, but he wasn't very good at it. He would probably say these aren't very good either, no translation is your own after all, but I don't speak spanish, and to me these are close to the way he used to make me feel when he read them. Very lovely, and a little alarming.

I tried reading them to my daughter--she's having a baby in the summer--but it didn't really make anyone feel alarmed. I guess I need to learn to develop my own versions.

This is the book that everyone who loves FGL must have. I even started to learn it in spanish.

I'm not always fond of Merwin's verse translations, but he's done a beautiful job on these. Every poem is solidly lineated. They sound as though they'd been written originally in English. The diction always feels right--neither too high nor too low.

If you've never read Follain's verse poems, this is the way to start. His poems manage to be both highly economic and evocative. They are rich and earthly, intellectually precise and "metaphysical" in the sense used by Eliot.

Fortunate we are that W.S. Merwin commits as much time to translating other poets from other countries and times as he commits to writing his own magnificent works. His gifts as a poet make him far more than a translator: Merwin finds the seed of intention of the poet's works he embraces and manages to lift the thoughts intact into the English language.

This very fine compilation of the poetry of Jean Follain has been gleaned from nine books of poems, curating the best of Follain's poems into a single heady volume. The poems are brief, address history and the effects of time passing with an economy of words that distill portions of moments into indelibly whispered thoughts.

OCTOBER THOUGHTS

'How one loves
this great wine
that one drinks all alone
when the evening illumines its coppered hills
not a hunter now
stalks the lowland game
the sisters of our friends
seem more beautiful
at the same time there is a threat of war
an insect pauses
then goes on.'

Read it several times and the atmosphere of World War II in the tremulous French countryside is palpable. And this is only one of many. Merwin allows us the pleasure of reading the poems in both French and English, a fine concept that Copper Canyon Press continues to pursue. A superb collaboration of poetic sharing. Grady Harp, December 06

This is a major work, standing towerlike above quite a bit of rubble of the last 80 years. The modern era of American poetry produced some great effects with its wide open experimentation and daring, propelled by Pound and Eliot and carrying through the 1960s. But in recent decades, one might have wondered what a poet was supposed to do next. Every stunt both stylistic and personal had been tried. We produced our own graveyard school of poets whose death notices, usually by suicide or other misadventure, arrived before their major works.

Merwin, who was there too, now demonstrates what a poet still has to do: tell stories, remember the important days, find the connections, and convey it all with deep feeling and conviction. Each poem in this set is a gem of descriptive remembrance, perfectly pitched. Some years ago we had the gift of Robert Penn Warren going into his grand stride in late maturity. Merwin, entering his own bardic phase, teaches us again something of the fruits of maturity, a lesson too infrequently heard in our great continuing national romance with the young and the reckless, the fast life and the beautiful corpse. Reading and hearing him is something more than pleasure and satisfaction -- it is a real need personally and generally. Spread the word.

These moving poems stay with you. With their graceful flatness, many feel like strange, shimmering fragments of narrative; there is an interplay of mystery and revelation that opens onto a new--or forgotten--realm of poetic experience.

This book is a series of fanciful fables of many moods. I ration it out as a bedtime book. When I finish it I will start over.

The book consists of a series of essays by the poet W.S. Merwyn.

Some of the journeys herein are rambles, and you're not quite sure where Mr. Merwyn is headed. The last paragraph of each, however, ties it all together, and sends your mind a-reeling.

A most worthwhile read by a master!

That Mr. Merwin may be the finest living American poet, with perhaps the most original and unique voice in American literature, immediately raises the expectations of any work devoted to him. I have been a reader of his since I was a student in San Antonio, Texas. I have been a comprehender of his poetry since I took seriously the poetry of the Latin American and Spanish surrealists. Merwin is not for the faint-hearted. Even his early poems, those collected recently under the title of The First Four Books Of Poetry, though often smacking of poetic exercise, require acute attention to language and definition. This particular collection titled Many Mountains Moving brings all of Merwin's strengths into the light and demonstrates how miraculous the act of moving mountains his poetry achieves.