The Shadow of Sirius

by W.S. Merwin

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS.

Honored as one of the "Best Books of the Year" from Publishers Weekly.

"In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style." —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books

“Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[The Shadow of Sirius is] the very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy." —Harold Bloom

"[Merwin's] best book in a decade—and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom." —Publishers Weekly

"Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence." —Orion

"[The Shadow of Sirius] shows the earthly possibilities of simple completeness in a writer's mature work. More than an achievement in poetry, this is an achievement in writing." —Harvard Review

The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin’s new book of poems. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound—the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” In “Photographer,” Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by “someone who understood.” In “Empty Lot,” Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?

somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling

W.S. Merwin, author of over fifty books, is America’s foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: Migration won the National Book Award, and Present Company received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, American, The United States Of America, Classics, Literature, 21st Century

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

William Stanley Merwin was an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose.

William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

Merwin received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009; the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005, and the Tanning Prize—one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets—as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 2010, the Library of Congress named him the 17th United States Poet Laureate.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Stories come to us like new senses’

W.S. Merwin’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry, The Shadow of Sirius, is an enrapturing look at the memories which have shaped our lives and send us forward into eternity. Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010-2011, and recipient of numerous awards, including two Pulitzer’s, one for this collection and a previous award for The Carrier of Ladders in 1971,
Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010, W.S. Merwin has proven himself time and time again to be a champion of the pen and prose, and this slim collection may be one of his very best.

‘From what we cannot hold the stars are made’

The Shadow of Sirius spends much of it’s time winding through Merwin’s memories, which are viewed as a shadow on the mind, a contrast of light and dark that corresponds to present and past. These memories form the building blocks of our character, and are always hand in hand with the present forming the bigger picture of everything we do. Merwin reflects often upon his mother, now gone into the shadow, and the lessons and values she instilled in him.
From Rain Light:
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know

Merwin demonstrates how life is a collection of wisdom we gain through experience. He shows how each day, each vision, each color, smell and feel of the world which we pass through, leaves an imprint upon our minds and souls. We are always growing, always changing, always learning.

Worn Words:
The late poems are the ones
I turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight

it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there

As the title implies, we are in the shadow of Sirius, the shadow of the heavens and of eternity. We are doomed to return to the dust, mortal in an vast endless sea of space. Like the star Sirius, we are a bright shining speck in the void, our memories and actions blaze through the darkness of existence until we are extinguished, but such a blaze of light is what casts shadows. Without life, without light, darkness and death would take no meaning, As in the poem Youth (included in it’s entirety below as it is too beautiful to miss), without loss we could not ‘learn to miss you’. Through the collection of memories, through the fusion of past and present, through our acquisition of wisdom, we form a space in the void of existence that leaves a shadow, leaves a mark, leaves a legacy, that is both ephemeral and eternal. Through Merwin, all those he has known and lost exist forever in his prose:
‘As those who are gone now
keep wandering through our words
sounds of paper following them
at untold distances’

Merwin writes with little to no punctuation, in one long strand, broken occasionally into stanzas, that flow endlessly and tirelessly in a river of thought. The language is simple, the metaphors and similies are nothing that will baffle the reader, but it works well to create a visceral vision inside the reader that is vibrant and immediate, while also haunting and translucent as a dream from which you have just woken.

‘a vision before a gift
of flight in a dream
of clear depths where I glimpse
far out of reach the lucent days
from which I am now made’

The words from Merwin are each a little gift to the world. For those who love poetry, for those who love words, and for those who love life, this is an extraordinary collection and a great introduction into the works of an American treasure. The great W.H. Auden, hand selected Merwin’s first book of poetry to be published, and if he speaks truth in Worn Words, than here in his later life we have an even greater wealth of insight and wisdom. I was quite sad in 2019 to learn of his passing, but his words will always live on.
4.55/5

Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

One of the Butterflies
The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.

A Codex
It was a late book given up for lost
again and again with its bare sentences
at last and their lines that seemed transparent
revealing what had been here the whole way
the poems of daylight after the day
lying open after all on the table
without explanation or emphasis
like sounds left when the syllables have gone
clarifying the whole grammar of waiting
not removing one question from the air
or closing the story although single lights
were beginning by then above and below
while the long twilight deepened its silence
from sapphire through opal to Athena"s iris
until shadow covered the gray pages
the comet words the book of presences
after which there was little left to say
but then it was night and everything was known

Just This
When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

2nd reading
Marvelous.

—

1st
There's a wonderful lack of obscurity here combined with an emotional directness that is rare in poetry, rare even in Merwin's poetry. I found the book powerful and recommend it highly.

[Jim Elkins]

A Cold Late Style

I read Merwin from The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, and The First Four Books of Poems— starting around 1974. No review can do justice to half a lifetime of reading, despite what reviewers continuously imply.

But there was increasingly a chill in Merwin, a kind of persistent, deep kind of cold. The Lice had sharp edges, scraps and shards of images, and the poems were as if read by an uneven voice. They fluctuated from astonishingly lucent to weirdly opaque, from ferocious to hypnotized.

His later work—this book is from 2008, eleven years before he died—is like a diffuse luminous fog. It is lovely but textureless. Its surface is crossed by small brittle waves, worrying over damp sand (that's partly from one of his images): in The Shadow of Sirius he is both slightly troubled and inconsolably deeply wounded, and at the same time he is also, sadly, I think, for his readers, at peace. After a while, reading the older Merwin, I felt chill, as if I had been walking too long on a foggy seashore.

Merwin's later poetry was not just a "last style" (a distinction Erwin Panofsky made about Albrecht Duerer, whom Panofsky said simply oscillated between styles), but something different, which clearly presupposed the "early" and "middle" styles. But it was also a counterexample to Said's praise of canonical late styles in Mann, Beethoven, Genet, Euripides, and others. Merwin's late style was something chill and quiet, not unpleasant, and not narrow, but also no longer responsive to the work and ideas of thirty and forty years before. It is possible to have a coherent and strong late style that is so far removed from earlier ways of writing that it is effectively written by someone else—as distant as Sirius. When I finished The Shadow of Sirius I decided it would be my last book of Merwin's. But the idea of a detached late style, so far removed from an early and middle style that is seems sometimes like the work of another person, stayed with me, and I've puzzled over it, with the help of Galen Strawson, in my own reading and writing.

2019, revised 2024

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

The old grieving autumn goes on calling to its summer
the valley is calling to other valleys beyond the ridge
each star is roaring alone into darkness
there is not a sound in the whole night
*
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us

[Wealhtheow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Merwin's poetry, which has a little sarcastic edge to it sometimes but always a sense of wonder and hope tinged with loss. Not much regret, though, and I like that. He writes with a sense of acceptance that I wish I had myself. I like his deceptively clear and simple style, as well. He says a lot in a very little while.

My favorite in this book was "Youth,"

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

[M Wiegers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, existentialist book. If it were possible, this book should be printed on translucent pages. In the end, the words remain and rise into being, floating in the world. May be his best in many years. Gorgeous, sad, full of love--I could go on with hyperbole--this book makes me happy to be alive and in the presence of such a writer.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

some poems i really liked, some i didn’t care for, some went right over my head.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Shadow of Sirius

I really love W.S. Merwin. He takes the most basic materials and finds their power, hammering them until they’re . . . until they’re what . . . something eternal. There’s nothing fancy about his word choices, no overly weird layouts on the page. He does forgo punctuation, but it somehow adds to his simplicity, as if he doesn’t want to disturb the train of thought, and that draws you into thinking along with him.

There’s no unnatural posing going on. Merwin relies entirely on the resonant power of language. He writes often of nature but it’s almost degrading to call him a “nature poet.” Has anyone done this? Desist. It also seems completely unnecessary to give him a Pulitzer Prize, like throwing a twig on the bonfire.

Whenever I think about the Nobel Prize committee complaining about how caught up American writers are with themselves and their culture - and I often agree with them - I want to shout “NOT W.S. MERWIN! Give HIM the Nobel Prize!” Really, he deserves it. I hope he lives long enough for them to realize it.

I opened the book pretty much daring Merwin to do it again. Surely there couldn’t be more he could say after "The Lice," "The Rain in the Trees," "The Carrier of Ladders," the translations, etc. He can’t make the tired spring or stone or river into something so deep again, can he? Yes, he can. But Sirius is the brightest, most searing, most serious star. It’s the one you can sometimes see in the daylight.

"The Shadow of Sirius" is largely concerned with memory, with time and the reflection afforded only by getting older (and nature, too).

As a footnote, I will say "The Shadow of Sirius" isn’t my favorite of Merwin’s collections. Of the later poems, I prefer the beautiful “The Rain in the Trees.” I went back and forth on four and five stars. I gave this four because it isn’t my favorite Merwin, but then I thought about some poetry books that I’ve given five stars to that could never approach his greatness. In the end, I have to judge him in his own separate category, so that although this seriously kicks the ass of some of the other books I’ve rated the same or even better, it doesn’t actually kick Merwin’s own ass.

[Book2Dragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019) is among my favorite poets. His poems reflect on life through nature and he retains a sense of awe and awareness. I'll want to read these over, one by one, and let them sink into my soul and heart.

A good, grounding book for the times we live in.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

There are some poets who come relatively close to the household-name threshold, even in an America where poetry is about as dead as the influence of the Kennedy clan. W. S. Merwin is one of them. He's won the Pulitzer Prize twice (1971 and 2009, the latter for this book), the Academy of American Poets' Tanning Prize (1994), the National Book Award (2005), and the Bobbitt Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress (2005, for a different book). And, most recently, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. And this is not an exhaustive list by any means. I figured it was probably time to get around to reading him. Why not start with a Pulitzer winner? As well, I've been on a run of really, really good poetry recently (I've given two five-star and one four-and-a-half-star reviews to poetry books in the last two months, and that has never happened before), so I went into this confident that I'd love it. And then I started reading.

Now, I grant you, Merwin does come up with a line every now and again that makes a reader stop in his tracks and think about what an awesome line it is. (“the bird lies still while the light goes on flying”, from “Unknown Age”, is my favorite line in the book.) And sometimes he manages to combine a number of good-to-great lines to form an entire good poem (“Nocturne II” is a good example). But for the most part, this is a collection that seems phoned in to me, what a magazine editor whose name I have now long forgotten called “easy, false surrealism”. Merwin adopts Apollinaire's tactic of leaving out all punctuation, but his language doesn't have the ebb and flow one expects from poets who do this; his rhythms jar far more than roll. The images are stock, and while there are real emotions behind them once in a while, it's not enough to transcend the quotidian nature of the work itself.

There's some good stuff here, but not nearly enough to occasion doing more than taking it out of the library. **

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my .... thank you world. He is a magnificent poet. (He just won the Pulitzer.) Not sure? Read this .... (from a previous collection)

"Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

[Susan Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gorgeous book. "I have with me," Merwin says, "all that I do not know/I have lost none of it." But he also has with him all that he does know, and it shines everywhere in these poems. He admits his own preference, in his eighties of turning first to "late poems" because those are the ones "that are made of words/that have come the whole way." There's a lifetime in this book, a luminous panorama - and always with the awareness of how short a distance the whole way really is. When you're 25, 20 years is nearly a lifetime ago. But when you reach an age where a moment brilliantly clear in your mind shocks you with the realization that it's 50 years past, time becomes a shape-shifter. Merwin captures perfectly the sensations and epiphanies that occur in such moments. Like Updike's, his poems in old age are probably his best.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read other books by W.S. Merwin -- his poetry and also his translations -- but was unfamiliar with this latest collection of poems entitled "The Shadow of Sirius" until I was given it as a birthday present. Like a lot of Merwin's later poetry, this collection of poems is about age and mortality. As this collection suggests, however, the shadow of Sirius is the holding metaphor for the poems. Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky and its name from the Greek refers to the scorching or searing quality of this star's light. Sirius is also the place to which, according to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, souls go after they leave the body. Sirius also represents renewal in the way the yearly flooding of the Nile brought new life to the the Egyptians by creating fertile soil for new plantings. These poems exist in the shadow of this bright star's scorching light. The shadow is memory itself -- it is the play of light, darkness, temporality, and eternity interweaving with Merwin's memories that give us an insight to existence (ours, his?) in these poems.

Writing a review about a collection of poems is difficult precisely because poetry is not narrative and cannot be captured so easily in language. The best way to give a taste of what it is like to journey through these poems is to quote directly from the poet, himself, as he calls forth from the universe's chiaroscuro shadows a language that tells us of his memories. In an entitled Blueberries After Dark, he recalls his mother's death and also all the deaths and losses in her life ...

"my mother told me
that I was not afraid of the dark
and when I looked it was true

how did she know
so long ago

with her father dead almost before she could remember
and her mother following him
not long after
and then her grandmother
who had brought her up
and a little later
her only brother
and then her firstborn
gone as soon
as soon as he was born
she knew

In this poem, we are in the place where souls go. The "night" or death is described as something that tastes like blueberries eaten "one at a time, not early or late."

In another poem, where he is once again remembering his mother, it is the piano that evokes a memory of her:

...through the notes my mother's hand appears
above my own and hovers over the keys
waiting to turn the pages of Czerny
whose composition has completely dissolved

from her had a scent of almonds rises
which she had put on after whatever she had been doing
it survives with the sound into another life...

Of a lost love, he writes

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

Sirius is also referred to as the Dog Star. In a poem where he takes us back into the shadows of Sirius, we are following a black dog, making an oblique reference here to this other name for Sirius.

I can see nothing there but the black dog
the dog I know going ahead of me

not looking back oh it is the black dog
I trust now in my turn after the years

when I had all the trust of the black dog
through an age of brightness and through shadow

on into the blindness of the black dog
where the rooms of the dark were already known

We are, as Merwin tells us at the beginning of this poem, in the land of the shades or the shadows: "When it is time I follow the black dog into the darkness that is the mind of day..."

I find his reference to night as "the mind of day" just a wonderful metaphor.

In another poem, he captures how the past illuminates the present -- the past is always part of the present.

See how the past is not finished
here in the present
it is awake the whole time
never waiting

And how poignant his poem that captures the elusiveness of the moment and the difficulty of remembering. He hints that not being able to re-capture the moment in memory is perhaps our way of protecting ourselves from experiencing the pain of loss again. He calls this poem "One of the Butterflies."

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn into pain


In other poems he describes the distinct qualities of autumnal light. In The Making of Amber, he writes

The September flocks form crying
gathering southward
even small birds knowing
for the first time
how to fly all the way as one

at daybreak the split fig
is filled with dew
the finch find it
like something it remembers

then across the afternoon
the grape vine hangs low in the doorway
and grapes one by one
taste warm on the tongue
transparent and soundless
rich with late daylight

In September's Child, the beekeeper in me resonates to the image of "old hands holding honey jars sunlight on weathered faces knowing summer and winter well but bound to neither of them.."

And he ends this compendium with a poem entitled "The Laughing Thrush" where we find ourselves in that place between waking and sleeping, where the self floats between heaven, earth and the underground and where we are reminded about nature's powers of renewal, if we but can hear and see...

O nameless joy of the morning

tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there

son unquestioning and unbounded
yes this is the place and the one time
in the whole of before and after
with all of memory waking into it

and the lost visages that hover
around the edge of sleep
constant and clear
and the words that lately have fallen silent
to surface among the phrases of some future
if there is a future

here is where they all sing the first daylight
whether or not there is anyone listening.

As with all poetry, this is not the end of my reading of this collection of poems. It is opening the door to returning to plumb the depths of these poems again and again, finding something new to experience each time.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wise and beautiful.

Worn Words

The late poems are the ones
I turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight

it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first exposure to Merwin. There were some poems that blew me away, some not so much, but definitely worth the read. My favorites were “The Pinnacle” and “One of the Butterflies.”

[martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been on a huge Merwin kick lately, and wondering why I overlooked him for so long. This was a great choice for which book of his to read, since it just won the Pulitzer in poetry. (I'm blaming that for the fact that there's an actual waiting list at the library for it; and the general nerdiness of Boston.) I really enjoyed paying attention to how it was organized, the different sections, and then how in the last one all the poems that mentioned months or seasons were in chronological order. Plus it has the same thoughtful older-poet tone as Jack Gilbert or Franz Wright or Czeslaw Milosz.

Though it's not in this book, here's my favorite Merwin poem ever: http://april-is.tumblr.com/post/87920...

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I don't read more poetry. Perhaps it's because I have this idea that reading poetry requires a more intense level of concentration than reading prose. I also tend to think that most poems benefit from being heard as opposed to being read, so I like to read poetry aloud to myself.

I discovered W.S. Merwin via the recent PBS documentary about the Buddha. I was very impressed with his insights and later watched a video of him being interviewed by Bill Moyers. He read some of his poetry on the Moyers program and I decided to read some of his work. "The Shadow of Sirius" contains some brilliant poems. There is a stateliness to them; a gracefulness that's very appealing. The finest of these poems are the ones that shocked me as I read them, or concluded with an unusually striking image. They are not all remarkable, but this volume is well worth reading.

[Margaryta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel I've really missed something completely, or perhaps it's the fact that I either didn't understand the poems, or I simply have a bad taste in poetry. Perhaps it's a combination of all of these factors.

To put it shortly, I didn't see what was so magnificent or wonderful about his work, as others have written before. He's already the third, I believe, poet who has won several awards and upon reading the work it went over my head. Yes there were some good lines here and there, but overall it was a struggle to get through the poems. I usually enjoy reading poetry before bed, but I had no incentive to pick the book up and read even one poem. After a certain point I didn't even bother touching it and dropped about three quarters of the way through.

Simply put, this was totally not for me.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely. The first 3/4 of this were stunning, ruminative, calming. The last quarter, with a few exceptions, is more so dedicated to opaque nature poems that left me a bit cold. I prefer all of the poems about memory, time, aging, history, death, grief. And there are many. There's a zen equanimity in Merwin's handling of such emotionally volatile themes, and I really couldn't get enough (until I could).

I should eventually read more of his work.


Some lovely poems:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning


Still Morning

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight


By the Avenue

Through the trees and across the river
with its surface the color of steel
on a rainy morning late in spring
the splintered skyline of the city
glitters in a silence we all know
but cannot touch or reach for with words
and I am the only one who can
remember now over there among
the young leaves brighter than the daylight
another light through the tall windows
a sunbeam sloping like a staircase
and from beyond it my father's voice
telling about a mote in an eye
that was like a mote in a sunbeam


Child Light

On through the darkening of the seeds and the bronze equinox/
I remember the brightness of days in summer/
too many years ago now to be counted/
the cotton-white glare floating over the leaves/
I see that it was only the dust in one sunbeam/
but I was a child at the time/

I hear our feet crossing the porch/
and then the glass door opening/
before we are conducted through the empty rooms of the house/
where we are to live/

that was on a day before I was nine/
before the lake and the water sloshing in the boat/
and what we heard about refugees/
and before Billy Green explained to me about sex/
and I saw my first strip mine/
and before the war/
and before the sound of the train wheels under me/
when the leaves were still green/
before the word for autumn/

that was before Ching and Gypsy/
and the sun on the kitchen table/
with the window open/
before the deaths by bombing/
and by sickness and age and by fire and by gas/
and by torture/
and before the scratched varnish of the study hall/
and before the camps/
and coming to Conrad and Tolstoy/

it was before the deaths of schoolchildren/
whom I had known and whom I heard of/

and before looking out into the trees after dark/
from the window of the splintery unlit chemistry lab/
into the scent of the first fallen leaves

(Goodreads is struggling with formatting so I added slashes to show enjambment even though Merwin does not)

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

This recent addition to an exalted career touches the reader on many levels and from many sides, generally united by a dreamlike style compressed into stump lines and short on punctuation. Phrases slide together and emerge with greater significance than their simple wording would suggest. Many poems are nostalgic, as befits an octogenarian concerned with the truths behind memories. One long nature series near the end steps through the seasons in the author's childhood home, experienced either through a visit or in his memory.

Careful reading allows us to match Merwin's observations with our own experience. For instance, as a pianist I appreciate the devotion to practicing reflected in "her fingers remember the right notes and keep listening for them," which is more than a physically rooted synecdoche, but conveys the way a musician turns an insert score into a meaningful rendition.

Perhaps inevitably, Merwin overuses poetic tricks, such as invoking an easy paradox through the superposition of opposites, particularly using words indicating sound but saying they are silent. He has an obsession with loss and silence, with names and the unnameable, and eternity ("In the whole of before and after"). Nevertheless, I found things to like in every poem.

[Daniela · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ☆☆☆☆ I really liked it.

Beautiful poems about the passing of time, memories, light and (literal) darkness. Some were difficult to grasp at times due to the absence of punctuation; they definitely need to be read more than once, slowly.

I enjoyed taking my time with this book. By the end, I felt like I had wandered through the author's emotional and sensory experience of life, as though I had truly drifted through his inner world. It left a ghostly trace on me, like a half-remembered dream or as if I had briefly inhabited someone else’s memories.

*

Nocturne

The stars emerge one
by one into the names
that were last found for them
far back in other
darkness no one remembers
by watchers whose own
names were forgotten
later in the dark
and as the night deepens
other lumens begin
to appear around them
as though they were shining
through the same instant
from a single depth of age
though the time between
each one of them
and its nearest neighbor
contains in its span
the whole moment of the earth
turning in a light
that is not its own
with the complete course
of life upon it
born to brief reflection
recognition and anguish
from one cell evolving
to remember daylight
laughter and distant music

*

[Muhammad Rajab Al-mukarrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, so beautiful. W. S. Merwin’s ability to show every side of his memories was incredible. Rain Light was one of the highlights in here.

“All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning”

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of poems that each seem refined to an emotional potency that is striking. The themes that run through most of Merwin, having a connection to a sense of place and the life around us, loss, and a desire to always try to understand more are combined with a focus on memory, how it affects our experiences and how it changes with time to create poems that (for lack of a better word) hit.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though some of these poems are new, they often have a mid 20th Century feeling -- the enjambement, the layers of ambiguity, the rich vocabulary, the syntaesthetic nature imagery. Is that why I love them so much? Probably. Does that make me old fashioned? No matter

[Ags · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really beautiful, and such a vibe. Loved that this was as earnest and warm as it was existential and heady. Really liked the tone/how much room the poems have to breathe. Such a strong theme throughout/this really felt like a collection in which all the poems really fit/flow together.

[Rob Gifford]

feels so much like a final deathbed statement that I was a bit shocked to learn Merwin lived another decade and published a couple more collections, although I suppose he wrote like he was dying since he was a young man

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first experience reading Merwin was a pleasure. Section three had a lovely seasonal cadence to it. I might try some of his translations next.

[VERTIGO dizzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

arguably the most haunting thing i’ve ever read.

can american poetry surpass this level of craft and refinement, when directly describing the ineffable? towards an expression of ‘not’? or the impossible logic of consciousness? it’s one of those books at the tail end of language, along with Beckett’s The Unnameable, and the works of Maurice Blanchot, though unlike those works this one is much quieter, fainter, with less momentum. i wouldn’t call it minimalist, but a lot of the tension is between the lines, on what cannot be expressed, the poems point to something outside of itself, and does what good ambiguous art does; use its restraint to lunge the reader into the divine (not religious or moral, i use the word loosely). in that sense i think Merwin’s poetry is very comparable to the transcendental films of Bresson.

Merwin sought to create an existential poetry book, but without angst, without utter despair. instead it’s an elegiac existential experience, and often ghostly ontological. it’s outside vitality shown through immense vitality, breathtaking

loss, absence, memory, decay, nothingness

🌀🌀🌀

STILL MORNING

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

🌀🌀🌀

NOTE

Remember how the naked soul
comes to language and at once knows
loss and distance and believing

then for a time it will not run
with its old freedom
like a light innocent of measure
but will hearken to how
one story becomes another
and will try to tell where
they have emerged from
and where they are heading
as though they were its own legend
running before the words and beyond them
naked and never looking back

through the noise of questions

🌀🌀🌀

NO

Out at the end of the street in the cemetery
the tombstones stared across the wheeling shadows
of tombstones while the names and dates wept on
in full daylight and behind them where the hill
sheared off two rusted tracks under a black
iron gate led up out of pure darkness
and the unbroken sound of pure darkness
that went on all the time under everything
not breathing beneath the sounds of breathing
but no they said it was not the entrance
to the underworld or anything like that
in fact all the houses along the street
had been paid for by what had come from there
in the days of the negatives of the pictures

🌀🌀🌀

A LIKENESS

Almost to your birthday and as I
am getting dressed alone in the house
a button comes off and once I find
a needle with an eye big enough
for me to try to thread it
and at last have sewed the button on
I open an old picture of you
who always did such things by magic
one photograph found after you died
of you at twenty
beautiful in a way
I would never see
for that was nine years
before I was born
but the picture has
faded suddenly
spots have marred it
maybe it is past repair
I have only what I remember

🌀🌀🌀

NIGHT WITH NO MOON

Now you are darker than I can believe
it is not wisdom that I have come to

with its denials and pure promises
but this absence that I cannot set down

still hearing when there is nothing to hear
reaching into the blindness that was there

thinking to walk in the dark together

🌀🌀🌀

A RING

At this moment
this earth which for all we know

is the only place in the vault of darkness
with life on it is wound in a fine veil

of whispered voices groping the frayed waves
of absence they keep flaring up

out of hope entwined with its opposite
to wander in ignorance as we do

when we look for what we have lost
one moment touching the earth and the next

straying far out past the orbits and webs
and the static of knowledge they go on

without being able to tell whether
they are addressing the past or the future

or knowing where they are heard these words
of the living talking to the dead

🌀🌀🌀

THE MOLE

Here is yet one
more life that we see only from outside
from the outside

not in itself but later
in signs of its going
a reminder
in the spring daylight

it happened when we were not noticing
and so close to us
that we might not have been here
disregarded as we were

see where we have walked
the earth has risen again
out of its darkness
where it has been recognized
without being seen
known by touch
of the blind velvet fingers
the wise nails
descendants of roots and water

we have seen them
only in death and in pictures
opened from darkness afterward

but here the earth
has been touched and raised
eye has not seen it come

ear has not heard
the famous fur
the moment that finds its way
in the dark without us

🌀🌀🌀

LIGHT OUT

The old grieving autumn goes on calling to its summer
the valley is calling to other valleys beyond the ridge
each star is roaring alone into darkness
there is not a sound in the whole night

🌀🌀🌀

A MOMENTARY CREED

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me

I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me

it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me

it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me

there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me

the only presence that appears to stay
everything that I call mine it lent me

even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me

🌀🌀🌀

JUST THIS

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

[Catherine Bateson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one of my poetry benchmarks and individual poems are touchstones and prayers. It is a beautiful book - the poems are luminous, lyrical:

You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me
the star is fading
(from 'The Nomad Flute')

There's grief in some of the memories. But the impression I carry away with me whenever I read this books is the joy in crafting these poems, the great compassionate heart that has been poured into the work and the tenderness of it all, even grief.

All the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
(from 'Rain Light')

[Pierre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sitting on my shelf, there is a fair variety of poetry; the sensuousness of Baudelaire, the vitality of Whitman, the always inventive wordplay of T.S. Eliot, the Shakespeariness of Shakespeare and so on and I love every last word of it. But sometimes, it's nice to sit down on the way to work and digest poetry like Merwin's. The economy of style and the weight he gives every beautiful word is a joy to read. This is my first reading of Merwin and I was constantly impressed with the sly humour, the beauty of words and the overall imagery in this wonderful ode to memory and nostalgia.

Highly recommended.