The Vixen: Poems

Here is a memoryscape of days spent in a remote part of France: gardens and woods recalled in rich detail, mist which has ``found/ its way without sight into the hoofprints of cows,'' changes of season whence arise a transcendent fox, a snake reclaiming its skin, an old woman with a safebox of ash. Merwin, now 68 (his first collection, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952), outgrew his need for punctuation about three decades ago. Periods and commas, he has said, ``staple the poems to the page.'' And, indeed, freed of pauses and built from long lines that flow seamlessly into one another, these pieces soar with a polished dreaminess that returns to itself in the shape of a worn millstone ``...carved long before in the form/ of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be/ asleep the features worn almost away where it/ had gone around and around grinding grain and salt/ to go into the dark and to go on and remember.'' The present is stitched tight onto the past, the poems are at once pastoral and narrative, and none comes to a definitive end. Instead, each dissipates, the way a complicated flavor dissolves on the tongue. (Jan.)