Status Updates From Collected Poems 1952–1993

Now reading Travels, the latest book in the collection and the only one I haven't read yet. More rooted in ordinary reality, and less "oracular," than much of Merwin's earlier verse--at least so far--I've got about 80% of the book to go.

Read most of Dancing Bears (second book) but quit at the second of the 3 Cansos that end the book. Too much mellifluity for its own sake. Abstracted, knotted, "pretty".

Finished up Rain in the Trees. A mixed bag of poems; some apparently personal; others seemingly related to Hawaiian history, ecological concerns, etc. Sometimes more direct than Merwin's "high" period, sometimes just as oblique, images which feel attached to almost nothing on earth.

Now reading Rain in the Trees, which begins with poems that once again seem more "human", reflecting aspects of Merwin's own past.

I've finished Opening the Hand, which is a much more "ordinary" book than the earlier Merwin--poems about recognizable human events, 3rd person characters, less cryptic and dream-like. One poem is based out of a memory dealt with in prose in Summer Doorways; another seems to be a personal account of a pet dog. Interesting and enjoyable.

I've now begun reading Opening the Hand. The early poems in the book are very different from earlier Merwin (except for some of Drunk in the Furnace). Colloquial and a bit oblique, but also strongly rooted in family history, parent-child relationships, i.e. in recognizable human relations. And not done cheesily or sentimentally, but with restraint. "Yesterday" is especially powerful.

Finished Compass Flower. The modern world shows up here--Merwin's nouns tend to be "timeless" or outside modern civilization, but there is a mix here. A 3-star volume.

Now reading The Compass Flower (1977). The procedure is the same as the 3 preceding books, though the modern world breaks through occasionally and the tone is sometimes more casual.

Read the chapbook "Feathers from the Hill," a collection of haiku-like poems, mostly arranged in several long sequences. There are a handful of fine pieces here, but as an individual book I'd give this 2 stars at best, I think.

Finished up with Green with Beasts. There's a solid grouping of poems, mostly right in the middle of the book, with the greater part of the book seeming mostly like little more than pretty language. The Annunciation, The Mountain, The Prodigal Son--poems linked to the Bible--are more substantive and must come out of Merwin's childhood (his father was a minister.)

Now I'm (re)reading Green With Beasts, the 1956 volume. Some of the poems seem absolutely to be "exercises", but The Annunciation is quite fine.

Finished Carrier. Judgment of Paris is perhaps the best poem, and certainly one of the best of Merwin's career (though I haven't read everything!) Much here is "deep image", more or less beyond explication.

About halfway through Carrier. I find myself remembering more phrases and lines from this than I would have imagined. I must have read it more carefully than I thought, 40 years ago.

Now reading Carrier of Ladders, which won the Pulitzer though Merwin refused to accept it in protest of the Vietnam War (I think!) These poems are "vintage" Merwin mostly--a little ghostly, a lot distanced--but not always. "Judgment of Paris" is a classic--and it deals with, get this, the Judgment of Paris!

Finished reading The Lice. Some of his most notable poems are here: Anniversary of My Death, Last One, etc. A book which perfectly matched the sentiments of the time, and whose best poems hold up.

Now reading The Lice (1967), almost finished with it. It's one of the two books that cemented Merwin's abandonment of "intellectual" verse for the world of surrealism and image.

Finished reading Mask for Janus. The very epitome of "art for art's sake" or maybe "art for intellect's sake", very much consciously created intellectual works rather than expressions of emotion in the more usual lyric sense. Exercises. But there are several poems, especially toward the book's end, where the real world appears.

Now reading the first book Mask for Janus--which won the Yale Series. Begins with a couple of extraordinarily "intellectual" poems, beautiful words which don't seem to describe this world and don't quite seem to mean. Then some ballad-like poems which are strange but recognizably human.

Finished reading Writings to an Unfinished Accomp. The humor is pretty much out of this volume; the poems are objective correlative, or maybe "deep image"--image as emotional content.