Migration: New & Selected Poems (Paperback) - Common

by W.S. Merwin

The definitive volume from "one of America's greatest living poets."-The Washington Post Book World
A powerful case can be made for declaring W.S. Merwin the most influential American poet of the last half-century. New & Selected Poems is that case.
As an undergraduate at Princeton, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to "get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day." Over the last 50 years, Merwin's muse led him beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engaged a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of W.S. Merwin's work, "I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn't take so much from it into my own life."
Migration is the distillation of a profound body of work. Drawing the best poems from his acclaimed 17 books, and including a selection of new poems, Migration is the definitive Merwin volume. It embodies his evolving poetic style, commitment to bearing witness, and artistic and political nerve. There is nothing quite like this in American poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, The United States Of America, American, Nature

545 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2005

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

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to be mixed when it comes to this volume. It’s astonishing, representing selections from 52 years of W.S. Merwin‘s remarkable career. The date range is 1952–2004. And yes, as someone said here, it’s not a book you really finish. It’s a book you return to again and again. If you have to buy only one book by W.S. Merwin, let it be this one. I was fortunate enough to attend one of his readings at Poets House in New York in 2012 where he signed this one for me.

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny to put "read" on this, as though I read it and it's back on a shelf... when it's really a touchstone book that I'm sure I'll read forever and ever. The poems are wonderful, layered, accessible and emotional. I love this book.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I were stuck on a desert island and could only take one book, this would be the one. Merwin is my favorite poet, and this is a very good collection of work from throughout his entire career.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I most love about Merwin is that he is so sad the forests are being killed and the animals are being killed. That grief is really only a small part of his work, but that's what I'm here for, to get wrecked by how sad it is that the forests and animals are being killed. All the other poems -- about childhood and family and love and old houses in the moonlight -- well sorry Merwin but my eyes glaze over a little bit with those, which, yes, sorry, are most of what's here. But I'll read over and over what you have to say about foxes and gray whales and insects. Yes, insects make music with their legs! Yes, they will inherit the future when we are gone! Bravo!

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems that stand up to reading over and over at all different ages.

[peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry is something of a new venture for me. It takes patience and quiet. The book is full a good. I can't say I've read every single page and I don't know when you "finish" a book of poetry. But I'm going to give it a 4.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is pure, hypnotic luminous love. I read some of these to Diane in the last few days as she was transitioning on into the next realm. If poetry is appropriate for that journey, it's truly the work of the soul. Merwin, you did fantastic.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good selection spanning Merwin's career from his earlier cut-short pieces to his more recent, sprawling poetry. Dude knows his stuff. MY favorite poet, at any rate.

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this for school as well, and then Merwin came to residency to read from it and his new collection. Simply amazing! I will say that I prefer his later works.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

He is really great. Or, perhaps more accurately, his writing is really great. So, by extension, I imagine he must be really great. He is really great.

[Norman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Merwin's poetry is some of the most beautiful writing around, and this collection does a great job summing it up. I tend to think his best work started in the late 60's...

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merwin is in a category all his own. His poetry is undeniably epic.

[Erin Byers · Rating 5 out of 5]

He has always been one of my favorites.

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of my top 5 favorite poets. His writings integrate Buddhism and the life of the mind, and sorrow for the dying planet, and the complexities of love...truly wonderful!

[Dawn Tripp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this collection.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 5 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed the experience of reading this "new & selected" compendium of most of Merwin's career. He was a fellow preacher's kid (the one time I met him, that's what we talked about), and likewise prone to the use of Classical reference, Biblical reference, and myth.

I was not very taken by the early poems in this volume, not making a positive marginal note until "Pool Room in the Lions Club" on page 66, from the fourth collection that's listed. I liked three poems from his next collection, The Moving Target -- "Things" & "Savonarola" (a monostich) & "Another Year Come". Having visited the spot where Savonarola was burned, just last year, I was in tune for that one.

My other favorites were:
"The Last One"
"The Judgment of Paris" (which I read at our Passage Party)
"The Piper"
"Beginning"
"Something I've Not Done"
"The Unwritten" (double exclam, for this one)
"A Contemporary"
"Berryman"
"What Is Modern"
"To the Insects"
"After the Alphabets"
"Inheritance"
"The Wars in New Jersey" (double exclam)
"Authority"
"Testimony"
"That Music"
"Shore Birds"
"Travelling West at Night"
"Planh for the Death of Ted Hughes" (double exclam, and no, that's not a typo)
"To the Consolations of Philosophy"
"To the Grass of Autumn"
"To Ashes" (double exclam)
"To Impatience"

And that's quite a list, and Merwin will be on my reread list.

I'll end with the last two stanzas of "Berryman," which I may print out and put on the wall:

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

[Wong Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Returned to Merwin but it was my first time reading his earlier work. It has been a while since I read a collected and it reminded me how different the reading experience can be as opposed to reading a selected. Here, Merwin's artistic and personal trajectory become much more apparent - his voice, style, and poetic concerns morph with age and as a reader of a collected edition one has the privilege of time-travelling through that growth. In his brevity there is real, devastating power and often an aphorism or home truth lies in wait. More drawn to his later stuff though

[Salahuddin Hourani · Rating 2 out of 5]

English poetry is not for me, this was the second chance after Maya Angelous’

[Kathe · Rating 5 out of 5]

i return to these poems over and over, again and again
these words will be a lifelong companion

[gwayle]

I didn't get all the way through this one: I bit off more than I could chew with this 534-page retrospective. Some of the early stuff was gorgeous and mind-blowing, but I found myself liking it less as we crept towards the present day--more abstract, less accessible, and it just took more glasses of wine than I cared to drink on a weeknight to feel moved by the material. And since I've had it on my "currently reading" shelf for an entire year... So long, Merwin. I reserve the right to revisit this when another poetry mood strikes.

[Robert]

Got from Aliza for my holiday present. Merwin is currently US Poet Laureate. He is good; his poems are very metaphorical (and beautiful). They take a lot of work. I will never finish this book. p.64. have to read many of the poems twice--his poetry is complicated--sometimes I have no idea what he is writing about until the second reading (or third or fourth)

20 Jan, I am putting this book down for a year or so.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every April, inspired by National Poetry Month, my book group focuses one meeting on poetry. We read selections from this collection as well as some of Merwin's earliest and most recent work, but I kept finding my way back to this National Book Award winner. It has so much to offer-even for a pagan like me who only reads poetry one month a year.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this collection. Sure, not every poem will resonate with every reader every time, but I've found something in Merwin's work more often than in any other body of work. Merwin just keeps giving.

[Katherine Collins]

How can you not be intrigued by a poet who is famous for a work called The Lice? With lines like “My friends without shields walk on the target” and “I remember the rain with its bundle of roads”, I am inclined to read on and on.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a rather large (over 500 pages) collection of poems, and I didn't really find a lot that I truly enjoyed (which surprised me). Three that did catch my attention:
- Bread - p191 (written for Wendell Berry)
- Yesterday - p245
- Another Place - p344

[Tim Rooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not much a fan of poetry but the work of W.S. Merwin is an amazing experience to read.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M576mi 2005

[Len Edgerly · Rating 5 out of 5]

W.S. Merwin is my favorite poet, and this is one of my favorite books of his.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was gifted to me by a friend; I am very glad for this, I don't know if or when I would discover this poet on my own. I'm in love with these poems. The language is always couched in concrete, readily understandable images, and the transitions between images is usually intelligible, in the sense of being unified by temporal or causal continuity, like a traditional narrative. But this does not mean the language is plain. Like all good poetry, there are shocking and bewildering phrases, which evoke old, familiar, or commonplace emotions and experiences, allowing these experiences to arise to us in new forms. Moreover, Merwin's images are usually very extreme in either capturing nature faithfully, or coming up with surrealistic or magical situations; in both cases, these details are presented in such a way that it expresses human experiences in subtle and creative ways. This gives a wonderful balance between freedom for interpretation, and concrete details for inducing emotions and guiding the reader to certain interpretations. I look forward to reading through this entire collection, and to re-reading poems.

Here are some lines from some of my favorite poems so far:

"Comet of stillness princess of what is over/ high note held without trembling without voice without sound/ aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets/ of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences/ never caught in words warden of where the river went" ("Vixen")

"Surely that moan is not the thing/ that men thought they were making, when they/ put it there, for their own necessities... What does it bespeak in us, repeating/ and repeating, insisting on something/ that we never meant?... Too suddenly, recognize it too late/ as our cries were swallowed up and all hands lost" ("Foghorn")

"'You are a thin and colorful who ride/ alone on a thin and monstrous thing; suppose/ I rose up savage in a desolate place;/ are you not afraid?... 'No' she said./ 'Oh, then hold fast by the hair of my shoulders,'/ He said, 'hold fast my hair, my savage hair;/ and let your shadow as we go hold fast/ the hair of my shadow, and all will be well'" ("East of the Sun and West of the Moon")

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this collection is like sauntering through the Musee D’Orsay, browsing one of the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. Upon close inspection, the poems look like random renderings of verbal pigments, but from a certain distance, they reveal patterns of meaning, more or less distinct in their depictions of this illusory world.

“Almost everything you look on great sun / has fallen into itself here / which it had climbed out of like prayers / shadows of clouds / and the clothes of old women blow over the barrens / one apple tree still blossoms for its own sake” (p. 159), Merwin muses in “The Black Plateau,” which is reminiscent of Monet’s impressions of the orchard in Vétheuil.

“The cold of the heights is not the cold of the valleys / the light moves like a wind / the figures are far away walking slowly / in little knots herding pieces of darkness / their faces remote as the plaster above deaths / in the villages” (p. 159), Merwin reflects once again in “The Black Plateau,” as if catching a glimpse of Pissaro’s villagers in his paintings of French rural life, who, much like the poet, catches glimmers of light amidst the dashes of darkness and the gathering gloom.

All in all, what an impressive gallery of Merwin’s life work!


“I am never all of me
unto myself
and sometimes I go slowly
knowing that a sound one sound
is following me from world
to world
and that I die each time
before it reaches me”
—from “Words from a Totem Animal,” p. 148


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how you can ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—from “Berryman,” p, 256


“only what now is left to me
can I hope to guide as it goes
looking forth over the valley
from this room where the oven is
that baked their bread in the old days
for this place I too left behind
often and in so many ways
and set the feather in the wind

in deadly half-earnest Villon
launching into a legacy
found before he had well begun
that the form allowed him every
kind of digression and delay
that would put off the bitter list
which I confess appeals to me
who would rather leave that for last

my life was never so precious
to me as now James Wright once wrote
and then looked at his words and was
he said taken aback by what
he saw there but some thought like that
lives in my mind these years these days
through which the speed that is the light
brings to me to see it as it goes”
—from “Testimony,” pp. 452-453


Favorite Poems:
A MASK FOR JANUS (1952)

THE DANCING BEARS (1954)

GREEN WITH BEASTS (1956)
“The Wakening”

THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE (1960)
“Foghorn”
“Deception Island”
“Grandmother Dying”
“Burning Mountain”

THE MOVING TARGET (1963)
“For the Grave of Posterity”

THE LICE (1967)
“The Last One”
“The Gods”
“In the Winter of My Thirty-eighth Year”
“When the War Is Over”

THE CARRIER OF LADDERS (1970)
“The Black Plateau”
“The Removal”

WRITINGS TO AN UNFINISHED ACCOMPANIMENT (‘73)
“Something I’ve Not Done”
“The Unwritten”
“Ash”
“Finding a Teacher”

THE COMPASS FLOWER (1977)
“The Helmsmen”

OPENING THE HAND (1983)
“The Houses”
“Apparitions”
“Berryman”
“Emigre”

THE RAIN IN THE TREES (1988)
“Coming to the Morning”
“Utterance”

TRAVELS (1993)
“Cover Note” *
“Manini”
“Inheritance”
“One Story”

THE VIXEN (1996)
“The West Window”
“Color Merchants”
“Forgotten Streams”

THE RIVER SOUND (1999)
“227 Waverly Place”
“The Causeway”
“Lament for the Makers”
“Testimony”
“This Time”

THE PUPIL (2001)
“The Marfa Lights”
“A Friend Who Keeps Telling Me That He Has Lost His Memory”
“PlanH for the Death of Ted Hughes”

NEW POEMS (2004)
“To the Soul”
“To Age”
“To Impatience”