East Window: The Asian Translations

Following his recent book-length verse-narrative of 19th-century Hawai'i, The Folding Cliffs (Forecasts, Sept. 14), Merwin's 18th book of poetry--not counting as many translations--pays tribute to real and poetic landscapes whose presence, the environmentally conscious poet modestly hopes, should outlast our own. Whether calling to mind his youth in Manhattan or the bucolic wilds of his adopted Hawai'i, Merwin, like his peer A.R. Ammons, tirelessly uncovers a fluidity beneath all experience, here found in a resonant sense of nature's persistence (despite human encroachment) and in Merwin's wholly punctuationless lines. In ""The Gardens of Versailles"" he engages in his signature metamorphic mythmaking: ""and when all those men and horses// had gone the water flowed on and the sound of water falling echoes in the dream/ the dream of water in which the avenues/ all of them are the river on its own way."" Other poems, such as ""The Chinese Mountain Fox"" and ""The Stranger,"" are animated by elusive connections between legend and reality. A good portion of the book is given over to Merwin's much anthologized ""Lament for the Makers,"" a lucid memorial tribute in blocky rhymed quatrains to 23 personally influential poets from Dylan Thomas to Merrill, and the lengthy self-elegizing ""Testimony,"" an autobiography and Last Will bequeathing effects like ""early light seen from later years."" With its measured uniformity of tone smoothing the ebb and flow of that light, this collection confirms that Merwin increasingly seeks sensual terms in which to linger on loss and disintegration, and the ""the true sound of brevity/ that will go on after me."" (Feb.) FYI: Merwin's East Window: The Asian Translations, featuring poems by Li Po, Rumi, Muso Soseki and others, is due this December. (Copper Canyon, $16 paper 348p ISBN 1-55659-091-1)