Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Merwin's masterfully refined, meditative poems stem from his dwelling mindfully in one beloved place and handling words as though they are seeds, flowers, stones, and water. A former poet laureate and National Book Award winner, Merwin received his second Pulitzer Prize for his previous collection, The Shadow of Sirius (2008), and here extends his practice of closely observing nature, time, and human paradoxes. For four decades Merwin has been restoring land in Hawaii, the setting for the opening cycle of rinsed-clean lyrics, in which palm trees, clouds, each the only one of its kind, and his garden accentuate the perfection of nature no question and no doubt in contrast to the confusion and yearning of humankind. As he watches crows flying across a clear sky, he thinks, Nothing is missing. Yet he also writes of the deprivations of his gritty New Jersey childhood and his long wandering years. As Merwin contrasts reverence for the living world with heedless environmental destruction, anger surfaces. But gratitude prevails, and Merwin offers thanks for many gifts, including words / that come out of silence and take me by surprise / and have carried me through the clear day. Merwin has attained a transcendent and transformative elevation of beaming perception, exquisite balance, and clarifying beauty.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This two-time Pulitzer winner returns with an expansion on his previous collection, The Shadow of Sirius, where themes of age, memory, childhood, and man's relationship to the natural world again dominate his signature unpunctuated, plainspoken lines: "As the dream of summer is almost gone/ I wake to a beloved dream of autumn/ the love of my life is with me." Here, Merwin recounts a life lived in relation to an outer world that is slowly being erased: "Where I dug the logs into the rise/ to make the steps along the valley/ I forget how many years ago/ their wood has dissolved completely now/ disappearing into the curled slope." In this erasure he discovers a world irrevocably changed, almost unrecognizable: "Youth is gone from the place where I was young/ even the language that I heard here once." But this displacement and confusion-"Ghosts of words/ circle the empty room"-are Merwin's opening to a new and hard-won sense of beauty, a kind of worldly astonishment: "it may be that the sound of a city/ is the current music of vanishing/ naturally forgetting its own song." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Former U.S. Poet Laureate (2010-11) and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Merwin returns this year with a new collection (after The Shadow of Sirius). Here, he does not pretend to be hip or quirky or aloof or to adapt any other trending style; instead he is once again himself, the image poet who with his own brand of unpunctuated form technically bests anyone writing poems today barring C.K. Williams and a few others. Shadows are here, of course, as are other obsessions such as birds and wind from which Merwin creates myths, reminding readers of his oft-anthologized "The Last One," as he does best in section two with "Only Sparrows" ("the sparrows of morning/ did not remember/ the evening sparrows") and "On a Distant Shore" and others, turning the "memory poem" inside out of its narrative sleeve and giving it a universal dark Merwinian quality. -VERDICT Consume these works slowly and if possible out of order. Merwin's narrative scope is characteristically narrow. Read in succession, then, the poems here may seem similar. Part of the joy, though, is in hearing Merwin's voice repeat themes throughout the book as if cast each time afresh in new shadows. [See Prepub Alert, 11/18.13.]--Stephen -Morrow, Hilliard, OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
