Lament for the Makers

""Our plesance here is all vain-glory/ This false warld is bot transitory,"" wrote William Dunbar in his 16th-century poem, ""Lament for the Makaris."" The piece was not only a meditation on death but a memorial to a slew of influential writers (Chaucer, and the like) who had passed on. Now, borrowing title, theme and rhyme scheme, Merwin, at age 69, does likewise: ""The notes in some anthology/ listed persons born after me."" So he turns to embrace a star-studded corpus. Twenty-three of his mentors, from Frost to Plath to Roethke to Merrill, are fondly, if briefly, remembered in this 208-line dirge (""then word of the death of Stevens/ brought a new knowledge of silence""). And, in a stroke of clever marketing, a single poem from each of the departed, complete with photo and mini-obit, rounds out what is essentially a coffee-table book of a dead poets' society, a small but rich anthology of poems by 20th-century practitioners who influenced Merwin. (Nov.)