The Lice: Poems

by W.S. Merwin

This Fiftieth Anniversary edition celebrates one of the most ground-breaking books in American poetry. When first published in 1967, W.S. Merwin’s The Lice was ground-breaking. Its visionary urgency directly engaged the nexus of aesthetics and morality, exerting an immediate and lasting effect on the writing and reading of poetry. Like all great art, this monumental work continues to inspire.

As Merwin discussed in an interview, “The Lice was written at a time when I really felt there was no point in writing. I got to the point where I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me. I would be out growing vegetables and walking around the countryside when all of a sudden I’d find myself writing a poem, and I’d write it.”

When the War is Over

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an interview with David L. Elliot, Merwin stated:
“Most of The Lice was written at a point that I felt there was really no point in writing... I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me when I wasn’t thinking of writing.”

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
*

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever

Waking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older
It is there at hand I could take it
Except for the things I think I would do differently
They keep coming between they are what I am
They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably
It is how I have come to it
Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

There is nothing the matter with speech
Just because it lent itself
To my uses

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
*

When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merwin was born 30 September 1927, and died in March 2019. I first encountered his poetry in 2010, after seeing him in a documentary about the life of the Buddha. His even-tempered, self-deprecating way of puncturing the Deadly Seriousness of the other talking heads in the film was memorable; his poetic voice had to be as lovely, right?

Um. [Rain in the Trees] didn't wow me. It's from the 1980s sometime, and permaybehaps forty years of poeting had worn him down. It wasn't for me, as the polite formulation of "what the actual FUCK *is* this crapola anyway?!?" is phrased.

He died; I ran across that fact on Wikipedia; connected him with the nice old buffer in the Buddha thing and ILL'd this 1967 collection of Vietnam War-era stuff. It's a darn good thing I did. THIS poetry I like! Here is where the fortysomething poet whose professional life was contemporaneous with Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, and Denise Levertov (all friends of his) and the Beats (not friends of his), those slashers-and-burners of whatever rules there were at that point, were working.

Merwin wasn't going to be a Beat, they were too raucous for him. He got Pulitzers (twice!) for poetry, he was the United States Poet Laureate, he translated Neruda, he translated Euripides, he translated Gawain and the Green Knight in 2002; he was a busy professional poet. His legacy will last a while longer, though I doubt he'll be as enduringly popular as Seamus Heaney or Neruda...not enough there, there...and he will find his way into anthologies for a while after that.

But this collection, second that I've read, is worthy of your eyeblinks. It says something deeply meaningful in a personal yet relatable way. Merwin wasn't a groundbreaking iconoclast, and some of his early stuff I've run across was so pretentious and self-important that I am amazed the same man wrote it as wrote these poems. His later stuff was, well, in a word it was tired. Overworked the vein, it collapsed. But this? Prime-of-life, peak-of-powers poetical punditry. Every poems means something, both on its surface and on its interior. Read a poem one way, it's pretty; read it another, it's shattering.

The thing that makes this book so lovely is that it includes a dozen or so facsimiles of Merwin's hand-written or typed manuscript pages, some on glossy photo paper and two printed inside the paper cover, that really bring the reader into Merwin's emotional orbit. Seeing the pages that he composed his thoughts on makes the typeset version of the poem that much more meaningful. His presence, albeit in mechanically reproduced form, is *there* and that causes no small amount of spiritual-connection thrums through my non-poetical soul.

[Brodolomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesantan izbor Mervinove poezije nastale u različitim periodima njegovog stvaralaštva, sa naglaskom na izboru stihova iz „Vašaka”, zbirke pesama iz 1967.

Mervin se protejski menjao kroz vreme, možda je i istina da se u njegovom stvaralaštvu mogu osetiti tragovi svih važnijih pravaca u američkoj poeziji nakon Drugog svetskog rata, pravaca onih pesnika koji su pripadali takozvanoj tihoj generaciji, a opet imam utisak da bih njegovu pesmu uvek prepoznao među stotinama drugih. Nisu to iste pesme, ali opet su prepoznatljive. Ima kod Mervina želje da se bude veliki proročki pesnik (od čega boluju svi američki pesnici), ali da se bude prorok bez transcendentalne vizije. Gotovo da je nešto pomalo ćoravo od početka. Nikad nisam siguran gde je praznina i istrošenost namerna, a gde je puka omaška. Ako se pozovem na motiv vrata, koji često varira kao lajtmotiv, verujem da kad bi Mervin pronašao i prošao kroz ta vrata, da bi se obreo opet u onoj istoj sobi odakle je i pošao.


PROZORI

Ovde je dečak
koji dubi na glavi
otvorenih očiju
i gleda kroz jedan prozor
ravan sivi okean
naopačke
i profil ostrva koji visi iz njega
dole dole
sve do horizonta
štaviše i on sam visi
ni iz čega
i mogao bi da zakorači
i prohoda
po starom nebu daleko dole
sve do oblaka
u dalekim ostrvima
mogao bi da hoda po oblacima
na mestu gde su uglačani
mogao bi da skače
sa jednog na drugi ali
on posmatra svetlosti
kako se pale i gase
duž mračnih obala
i svetlosti koje hoda među oblacima
među ostrvima nad glavom
i oseća glavu kao čamac na plaži
i čuje kako se talasi lome
oko ušiju
ustaje i sluša i okreće se
prema sobi punoj starijih i punoj
upaljenog svetla
plav dan u dalekim prozorima
ne pokrećući se
odleće.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Talking about the poems in this book is like trying to determine Best in Show at the Pet Rock Beauty Pageant. I don’t know where to begin, so I can begin about anywhere. Here are random representational gobbets from W. S. Merwin’s The Lice:

The stairs the petals she loves me
Every time
Nothing has changed
(“I Live Up Here” p. 8)

The next day was just the same it went on growing.
They did all the same things it was just the same.
They decided to take its water from under it.
They took away water they took it away the water went down
(“The Last One” p. 11)

The other world
These strewn rocks belong to the wind
If it could use them
(“The Gods” p. 30)

One of the ends is made of streets
One man (sic) processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name
(“The River of Bees” p. 32)

Maybe some people like this sort of thing and think it’s poetry, but to be these things are unendurable. There is no texture, no tension, and nothing of interest syntactically. The diction is bland and predictable. The line breaks random and sometimes pointlessly irritating (“Empty bottles their / Image of hope”). They grind on, one unanchored yet turgid emotion to the next, couched in spooky vatic-pronouncements buttered by reflexive gravity and buoyed by vague, static archetypes (stones, sky, water, light). You could program a computer to write this stuff.

And yet W. S. Merwin is supposed to be one of America’s great poets, and The Lice is the book that is often touted by his champions as being his best. It was published in 1967 (I have a first edition, paperback that I’ve been grudgingly hauling around since 1994 or so – I bought it because of its reputation). So what is going on here? Although I am hardly a Merwin expert, it is hard to avoid him if you read poetry at all. He is in The New Yorker three or four times a year with another static little punctuationless drib, lately with some querulous “environmental” concern injected into it. He won the Pulitzer Prize last year (again), and his career goes back about six thousand years, to 1952 when W. H. Auden picked his first book The Mask of Janus to win the Yale Younger Poets Prize. All the Yale Younger Poets touched by Auden went on to solid, sometimes fabulous careers (Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, etc.), although there is some doubt in my mind whether this is because they were really good or because Auden picked them and thereby gave them American poetry’s biggest career boost of all time. Anyway, Merwin’s was a typical eager-beaver young person’s attempt to please the New Critics kind of book, full of clotted diction and snarled syntax showing, as the critics always feel compelled to point out, an expert use of form. Here is the first stanza and the first sentence from one of these, with a very, very typical 1952 poem title: “Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge”

There will be the cough before the silence, then
Expectation: and the hush of portent
Must be welcomed by a diffident music
Lisping and dividing its renewals;
Shadows will lengthen and sway, and, casually
As in a latitude of diversion
Where growth is topiary, and the relaxed horizons
Are accustomed to the trespass of surprise,
One with a mask of Ignorance will appear
Musing on the wind’s strange pregnancy.

So what happened? How did such a self-consciously pretentious, syntactically bewildering, verbally clotted, metaphysically self-important young poet get reduced to a few windy strewn stones and absolutely no semi-colons? My guess is Robert Lowell and John Berryman happened. And Merwin’s friends (although Plath was less known than he was) Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. And maybe The Beats. And almost definitely Robert Bly and James Wright. By the late ‘50s, Merwin knew his complicated Lord Weary’s McMansion approach to poetry was being eclipsed by a new sound, so he had to change. The problem was Merwin found that he lacked the sense of humor and the and the agility to compete with the best of the Confessionals, and The Beats were too outside the establishment to appeal to a careerist like Merwin, so he had to settle in with the Deep Image, the Stones-and-Bones poetry that Bly and Wright and a few others came up with in the late fifties and early sixties. It was a perfect match: the Deep Image poem is easy to write and it favors the humorless and the self-pitying and self-important. And so Merwin underwent a tiresome sea change the way American poets so often do, and it really worked out for him. The Lice was praised to the windy, significantly gray skies. Now fifty years later he persists with the Deep Image, adding a few dollops of surrealism for flavor (most of the Deep Image poets did this), dropping punctuation, and shortening up those lines. It is strange to me that this has worked out so well for Merwin, since as far as I can tell, nobody but Merwin writes Deep Image poems anymore. Not even Bly, who has settled into a kind of avuncular good gray poet mode, making him strangely similar to late-period John Ashbery (the two of them should do a radio talk show together, the way G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary used to). The Deep Image came under pretty savage attack via the Reaper Essays in the early 1970s, and youngsters such as Robert Pinsky helped secure their reputation by ripping into them as well (see his 1976ish book The Situation of Poetry for a rather fun evisceration of the stones-and-bones mode). By 1980 or so the Deep Image was pretty much discredited as a way to write poems. Again, except in Merwin’s case.

Here are a couple penny dreadfuls (in full, not excerpts) from The Lice. Read these aloud with a flashlight shining under your chin to pool your face in spooky campfire shadows. You’ll scare the hell out of the kids:

CROWS ON THE NORTH SLOPE

When the Gentle were dead these inherited their coats
Now they gather in late autumn and quarrel over the air
Demanding something for their shadows that are naked
And silent and learning

NEW MOON IN NOVEMBER

I have been watching crows and now it is dark
Together they led night into the creaking oaks
Under them I hear the dry leaves walking
That blind man
Gathering their feathers before winter
By the dim road that the wind will take
And the cold
And the note of the trumpet

DECEMBER NIGHT

The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch

The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end

Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men

These are all run in a clump on pages 42 and 43. I rather like the last line of the last one (Merwin does have his non-excruciating moments). But otherwise I fail to see how any of these poems rise to their own teeny-weeny occasions. Again, this is free verse at its worst – self-indulgent, pointlessly “mysterious,” formless yet fuzzily melodramatic. There is an unvarying three-note range of tone, unconvincing descriptions of nature, the heedless use of predictable archetypes – the moon, stones, wind, sky, all strewn about hither and thither. But then the Deep Image always was easy to ridicule: there is a “dim road that the wind will take?” Really? Where is this road? Does the wind have a speed limit? Why do the limbs bear feathers? How are white plants older at night? Does all this whiteness refer to snow? What’s wrong with the word snow then? Another problem is that emotionally Merwin is a mope most of the time. There is nothing wrong with existential despair, but when all your despair is existential (rather than specific) or unleavened by the slightest bit of humor, irony or basic self-awareness, the effect is that of a dorm room full of sophomore Goths and Emos. The more serious Merwin gets, the harder it is to take him seriously. Self-pity wrestles with self-importance in these poems, in tiny little set pieces that I find it hard to believe anybody would give a damn about. In fact I find it hard to believe Merwin even likes poetry. I just want to slug him in the arm and say “Come on, Bill! Lighten up! Have a beer and stop with the poems already.”

This book is 80 pages long. I am on page 51, so this is a grossly unfair review, since maybe the last thirty pages are killer-diller. But life is short. Dictum: Don’t Waste Your Time.

[Simon Robs · Rating 3 out of 5]

WSM's timeless of this, that, he, it. These are early pearly poems immersed from poet during turbulent 60's political zeitgeist.

CAESAR

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch and he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever

One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he's dead

[Eric Sutton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the themes of W.S. Merwin's collection "The Lice" more than I did the individual poems. Some of them were incredibly striking, but others were too allusive and abstractly symbolic. A poem, to a certain extent, demands attention from its reader, but at the same time should provide an open door, a way in. That wasn't always the case, and I found myself frustrated by Merwin's labyrinthine images and odd constructions I couldn't seem to wrap my head around.

However, taken as a collection, the slim volume is powerful. I took "The Lice" to mean that with which we carry with us, unwittingly or not. Merwin is an ecological poet in the vein of Wendell Berry but more cryptic. Still, lines like "There is no season/That requires us" and "Everything that does not need you is real" from the poem "The Widow" are clear testaments to the endurance of our earth despite the damage we wrought upon it. Everywhere his poems are splashed with human arrogance and greed, but it is ultimately the earth that will keep turning long after we are gone. Merwin pays homage to this unknown, resignation to the utterly baffling grandness of life. When seen from this perspective, his poetry is wonderfully cunning, subversive, and deferential.

"The Lice" has been reissued 50 years after its initial publication in 1967. Back then, Merwin wrote protest poems, anti-war and anti-destruction. It's amazing (and intensely sad) how pertinent they still are in an age of burgeoning, flexed-muscle nuclear war and sheer ignorance toward an environment that is trying to teach us so much with each disastrous storm, each record-setting heatwave.

While some of the poems were beyond my grasp, many were profound and incisive.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our finest living poet.

[Carolyn Hembree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn, Merwin at his best.

[Melissa Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised by how much I liked this book. I really liked it; it is a great book. The most striking thing was the revelation that THE LICE, published in 1967, features poems that are utterly unadorned. Everything is laid bare, with large, looming spaces between lines and no punctuation to lead you. The book includes 63 poems without being broken into sections and without notes. Merwin avoids modifiers in these poems, but when he does use them, he uses the perfect one: "knitted wells," "piled Grief," "hueless ribbons."

This book was a refreshing read after the contemporary poetry books I've been reading lately, many of which are heavy with language and boxed-in by their own cleverness. I like how Merwin blew things open in this book, all the while addressing the big, heavy topics of war and mortality.

Here are some favorite lines:

-"One thing about the living sometimes a piece of us / Can stop dying for a moment / But you the dead // Once you go into those names you go on you never / Hesitate / You go on"

-"But when you look forward / With your dirty knuckles and the wingless / Bird on your shoulder / What can you write"

-"My blind neighbor has required of me / A description of darkness / And I begin but // All day I keep hearing the fighting in the valley / The blows falling as rice"

-"He was old he will have fallen into his eyes / I took my eyes / A long way to the calendars"

-"Not that heaven does not exist but / That it exists without us"

-"Everything that does not need you is real"

-"If I could be consistent even in destitution / The world would be revealed"

-"If I could learn the word for yes it could teach me questions"

-"If there was grief it was in pencil on a wall"

-"Never to be found / What is like you now // Who were haunted all your life by the best of you / Hiding in your death"

-"Tonight once more / I find a single prayer and it is not for men"

-"The bird tracks end like calendars"

-"The old snow gets up and moves taking its / Birds with it"

-"If there is a place where this is the language may / It be my country"

-Everyone waited for it by the wrong roads"

-"Now all my teachers are dead except silence"

-"Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it"

-"Her soft face with its tiny wattle flushed salmon / I hear her small soles receding"

-"There is nothing the matter with speech / Just because it lent itself / To my uses"

-"And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be / Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy"

-"It was only when I began to appear / That you said I must vanish"

-"You were always embarrassed by what fed you"

-"My contempt for you / You named ignorance and admiration for you / Servility / When they were among the few things we had in common / Your trash and your poses where what I most appreciated / Just as you did"

-"I am bringing up my children to be you"

-"I am not ashamed of the wren's murders / Nor the badger's dinners / On which all worldly good depends / If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything"

-"I have asked this question before it knows me it comes / Back to find me through the cold dreamless summer / And the barn full of black feathers"

-"the piled / Grief scrambling like guilt to leave us"

-"I do not know what my wars are deciding"

-"Their clear eyes unknowable as days / And if they see me do not recognize me do not / Believe in me"

-"Where else am I walking even now / Looking for me"

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Much too dependent on mythology and arbitrary author-determined symbolism for my taste. Also, would it kill you to use some punctuation? If I spend all my time trying to figure out where the commas and the semicolons go, I don't have any time to sift for meaning...or even a bit of crisp diction amid all the muddled language.

[Anina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this at least once a year. So good.

[Gee · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I set out reading this book, it made me feel really stupid. The poems are dense and, to me, inscrutable in the first half, almost exclusively like IN SCRUT A BLE leading up to a banger last line or couplet such as “Whatever I have to do has not yet begun” and “Today belong to few tomorrow to no one” and “But we were not born to survive / only to live”. As I progressed through the book I became so totally immersed in this world that I think it’s my new favorite. I also think that some of the more bible-y (? Not actually sure) references that I didn’t get thinned out in the last 2/3. At any rate by page 40 I was halfway through and totally hooked. There is not even a suggestion of punctuation anywhere in any of these poems which I am obsessed with, gives them amazing flavor…these poems exist in this world where it takes an enormous physical strength to lift the sun and the moon up over the horizon and you feel it in every poem….I really am happy to have, in this moment, have read this version of poetry during wartime. In the case of this book it was the Vietnam War and the poems are not preachy or even overtly political, even the one with War in the title, they just ache with this horrible disappointment, grief, and confusion, in a way that didn’t depress me but instead made me feel less alone and more ready to commune with my beloved ones. The last line of “Avoiding News by the River” is “If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything” which is very much the thesis of the book, which is so full of animals and grief for being a human among animals, which I guess is a big part of how I feel as someone who loves animals. Anyway thinking I will put a full essay abt this book in my zine because i just love it….FUCK punctuation!

The library copy I borrowed had at least two pages torn out of it…would love to know what they said.

[Sophia L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I read more poetry collections when I was younger, I used to just read whatever came across my way. This book is absolutely beautiful. It reminds me of Rilke, though I have never once read Rilke, but someone described to me how they wanted a tattoo that said "Live the Questions Now" and I understood where he was coming from. This book deals with America, War, Nature, Humanity, Death, and the long, heady list of things that sensitive people care about and pack carefully this anxiety into their daily lives. When I have a child, I will ensure that they read this book.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lice, not to be confused by the band Lice headed by Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman.

Incredibly fragile poems. They doen’t even have grammar to help support them. If you breathe too hard they’ll Jenga asunder. They remind me of those late Schumann violin sonatas, when Schumann was starting to get batt and was writing feeble musicy. It’s poetry written during an eclipse. Days when even getting off the bad is a worthy achievement. There’s something to behold, in these weak weak creatures.

[Barclay Blankenship · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again”

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Provision”
All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound
Of rain
From memory
And in the wall
The dead increase their invisible honey
It is August
The flocks are beginning to form
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands
What you do not have you find everywhere

Gorgeous, dark, memorable poems. I read them mostly while nursing my baby during the pandemic and they felt strangely timely. This period does not come close to approaching the horrors of the Vietnam War, but there is a shared sense of helplessness and reliance on the spiritual relief of nature that Merwin expresses so beautifully here.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merwin's breakthrough book reads as if it's written by the collective unconscious. "Tell him / That it is we who are important" (from "For a Coming Extinction") Merwin engages, puzzles, and awes the reader. I am grateful to be guided through his work by poet teachers Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder from The Community of Writers. I don't think I could have approached more than one or two of these poems otherwise, and the rewards here are great.

[Claudia Skelton · Rating 4 out of 5]

W.S. Merwin's poems seem to describe the world events about 50 years ago - war, battles, assassination, cultural issues, etc. Although I did not understand the message of many of the poems, I did feel like they relate to our current world, especially his ideas about wars. It was hard to read, but worthwhile.

[Megan Alyse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merwin is just amazing . His poetic structure offers the reader esoteric language unhinged from punctuation and syntactically brilliant. This book isn’t an easy read . But it’s one that’s changed the way I read poetry.

[Rauan · Rating 4 out of 5]

mannered, misty, atmospheric and hard to read. but worth reading.

[Brooke Shaffner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taut and haunting; frightening auguries breathe in the silences between lines, stanzas. The bleakness began to level toward the end, when I wanted more variation.

[Jas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd rate it this high because, as in most such collections, it has more than two or three that are fine work.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poetry book of all time.

[Drunken_orangetree · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening set of poems are relentlessly obscure, but the set on winter in the middle of the book are great.

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one”
— Whenever I Go There

“Of all the beasts to man alone death brings justice”
— A Scale in May

Merwin quite effortlessly proves that even a crowd of characters can be quite conveniently accommodated in a poem without making it look somewhat claustrophobic. In The Lice, he does this again and again and, along similar lines, he also presents that even the most commonly performed activities can beautify a poem instead of making it dull.

[Stephen Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written during a period of deep depression in Merwin's life and you can tell; it's cohesive in it's bleakness and hopelessness. So, he finds here an emotional core to back up his new minimalist style and, ultimately, this new style fits the dark content of these poems really well. This is already a big improvement over his previous book in this style.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lice, with its obscure nature, presents a double-edged sword in poetry. While it offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective, its opacity may alienate some readers. However, for those willing to delve into its enigmatic depths, The Lice rewards with moments of startling clarity and raw emotion, making it a compelling if challenging read.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Merwin class that I finally got around to reading.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful as all his poetry, but a little spare. Lacking in comfort and the imaginative brilliance that lights up my favourites of his poems

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merwin was only 38 years old when this death-obsessed powerful book of often surrealistic poems was published. Coming back to it after many years, I found it is still remarkable book.