Garden Time

by W. S. Merwin

Hardcover, 2016

Call number

811 MER

Collection

Publication

Copper Canyon Press (2016), 96 pages

Description

W.S. Merwin is arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century - an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. This new collection written in his late-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Telegraphing between past and present, he shows us a powerful and moving vision of the eternal, focusing on images of mornings, sunsets, shifting seasons, stars, birds and insects to capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world. In a poem about Li Po, 'now there is only the river / that was always on its own way'. In another poem he dreams that 'the same river is still here / the house is the old house and I am here in the morning / in the sunlight and the same bird is singing'. He remembers when 'dragonflies were as common as sunlight / hovering in their own days' and recalls 'a house that had been left to its own silence / for half a century'. In a poem of wonder entitled 'Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud', he writes: 'I keep looking for what has always been mine / searching for it even as I / think of leaving it.'… (more)

Library's review

Merwin writes with calm observance of memory and mortality. (Brian)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Bostonseanachie
This slim volume of Merwin's work contains certain gems. I was struck by "The Sound of It," a poem lamenting (or maybe just remarking) on the fact that the stopping of a dog's bark or a day's rain is not itself heard, but rather only the silence or what replaces it, or what was always there that
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the bark or rain caused us not to attend. Also by the ultimate poem, "The Present," in which two leaving the garden nevertheless simultaneously reach for a senseless gift neither can keep, but laugh when their hands strike each other while so reaching.

That said, the poems in the second half of the book devolved into a murkiness, in which Merwin largely lost the power of the specific and tangible image and instead noodles in a kind of haze thanking his lucky stars for his late-in-life love or remarking with wonder on his old age. Neither the love nor his old age are presented vividly, so the effect is largely maudlin.
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LibraryThing member dasam
Give this collection a few pages before you discover the understated eloquence of age and loss and love in the face of it all. While this is not his finest collection, Merwin offers us his truth with language that is accessible to those who do not regularly read poetry. Yet many of the poems have
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depth of thought and feeling and a koan kind of craft that belies what seems prosaic at first reading. I highly recommend it whether you are in the last third of life or just beginning your too short journey. Poetry like Merwin's helps us all to pay close attention both to the questions and to the only answers in the now.
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LibraryThing member Overgaard
I love him

Pages

96

ISBN

1556594992 / 9781556594991
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