The Moon Before Morning

This two-time Pulitzer winner returns with an expansion on his previous collection, The Shadow of Sirius, where themes of age, memory, childhood, and man’s relationship to the natural world again dominate his signature unpunctuated, plainspoken lines: “As the dream of summer is almost gone/ I wake to a beloved dream of autumn/ the love of my life is with me.” Here, Merwin recounts a life lived in relation to an outer world that is slowly being erased: “Where I dug the logs into the rise/ to make the steps along the valley/ I forget how many years ago/ their wood has dissolved completely now/ disappearing into the curled slope.” In this erasure he discovers a world irrevocably changed, almost unrecognizable: “Youth is gone from the place where I was young/ even the language that I heard here once.” But this displacement and confusion—“Ghosts of words/ circle the empty room”—are Merwin’s opening to a new and hard-won sense of beauty, a kind of worldly astonishment: “it may be that the sound of a city/ is the current music of vanishing/ naturally forgetting its own song.” (Mar.)