Garden time

Merwin's flowing, unadorned, contemplative poems are exquisite distillations of consciousness, concentrated inquiries into life's spiral of light and dark, dark and light. This gentle, musing, grateful, and quietly elegiac collection by the distinguished former poet laureate and honored recipient of major literary awards follows the current of a year from autumn equinox to autumn equinox. Merwin marvels at time's slipperiness and at memory's flashes, mists, melodies, and reliable favorites close at hand, like gathered stones. He uses the old words, which are solid, familiar, yet still mysterious in their infinite evocations. These riddling poems of shadows and seeds, birds and dragonflies, rivers and trees, forgetting and remembering, opening and closing, silence and song ask us who we once were and who we are now. In these pristine and balanced lyrics, joy and sadness change places in an instant as do sun and clouds. Merwin mourns nature's decimation, celebrates its cycles, and cherishes his own precious late happiness, wondering, Is it I who have come to this age / or is it the age that has come to me? --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

Even with more than 20 books of poetry to his name, Merwin (The Moon Before Morning) has more to say. He makes much of the cycles of nature and the manner in which things repeat: "the rocks are singing/ under you out of the unending silence/ where the world goes on beginning." There is a melancholy that suffuses these poems, and because the book reads almost as a kind of retrospective exhibit, there is little innovation here to truly excite the reader. Merwin himself seems to recognize this, writing "The question itself has not changed/ but only the depths of memory/ through which it rises." He also contemplates the potential for defiance through language as well as the irony that "words have been used for/ so many things/ how can they speak now." Readers may expect a little more from a former U.S. poet laureate who has won every major honor in his field. There is plenty of subtle, quiet poetry within this fine book's pages, but it never quite reaches the excellence of which Merwin is capable. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

THE OTHER HOUSEI come back again to the old housethat I thought I knew for most of a lifetime the house I reclaimed from abandon and ruinand that I called my home at times when I was hereand at times when I was somewhere far from here this time I have not come to reclaim anythingbut to move nothing and to touch nothing as though I were a ghost or here in a dream and I know it is a dream that has no agein this dream the same river is still herethe house is the old house and I am here in the morning in the sunlight and the same bird is singingTO WORDS IN THEIR SLEEPHave you slept the whole summer away here with the dogsdo you believe in wakingdo you dream that you are somewhere elsedo you remember what you meant to say do you remember the sounds of voicesyou once hearddo you know who you aredo you still speak the old language are you older than you can sayyou who never told the whole story only what came to mindNO TWILIGHTHow suddenly now it seems that the dayis over and on the island where Ihave lived these late happy years of my life that Paula and I have been togetherthere is no twilight when the day is donethe day's shadow is gone in the moment it was here with all that went beforegone the same way into the one nightwhere time means nothing that is visiblewhen I look up after the light has gone hearing a seed fall somewhere in the dark Excerpted from Garden Time by W. S. Merwin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.