Fresh from several much-praised book-length works, the impressively prolific Merwin (The Folding Cliffs, etc.) enters his sixth decade as a publishing poet with a decidedly mixed group of new short poems. Recent collections have portrayed the sights and sounds of Hawaii, Merwin's adopted home state, along with memories of his Atlantic coast boyhood. Though both are represented here, they take a backseat to astronomy and the night sky, which occasion many reflections on mortality, transience and the void, delivered in Merwin's familiar, sinuous, punctuation-free sentences. One poem remembers "the year of the well of darkness/ overflowing with no/ moon and no stars"; others portray "the darkness thinking the light" or "the white moments that had traveled so long." Merwin's overreliance on a few key words threatens monotony for the astronomy-centered first half of the book. The poems shine when Merwin finds subjects more specific and concrete than time, space, darkness and light. "Aliens" describes the beauty in a flock of linnets; "Before the Flood" portrays the poet's father as Noah. "Plan for the Death of Ted Hughes" becomes a genuinely original, understated elegy. And the poems near the back of the book are the best Merwin has done for many years—among them a meditation on liberal guilt, a strong dawn piece ("the teeth of roofs and the thin trees") and a bitter poem about Matthew Shepard: "This is what the west was won for/ and this is the way it was won." (Oct.)
Forecast:Merwin has won about every award there is (Pulitzer, Bollingen, and so on). He has appeared frequently this year in the
New Yorker, and his role as ecological advocate has recently raised his profile. All these factors may help boost his new work; the sheer number of recent books, however, risks creating a Merwin glut.
