Review of 'The first four books of poems' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I guess I just wanted to start at the beginning. What I found is an understandably uneven collection of first efforts from a famously prolific poet who would go on to write some of our most cherished American poetry.
The first book, A Mask for Janus, is full of overly clever pieces - some of which made me roll my eyes. It certainly establishes Merwin as a poet to watch but you can tell he's just showing off in some places.
The Dancing Bears, the sophomore effort, is true to its place in an artist's life. Merwin dispenses with the cleverness but can't quite harness his voice so the poems are opaque in places, oppressive in others. I think I decided to hate the second book somewhere in the middle of East of the Sun ans West of the Moon.
Finally, in Green with Beasts we catch a …
I guess I just wanted to start at the beginning. What I found is an understandably uneven collection of first efforts from a famously prolific poet who would go on to write some of our most cherished American poetry.
The first book, A Mask for Janus, is full of overly clever pieces - some of which made me roll my eyes. It certainly establishes Merwin as a poet to watch but you can tell he's just showing off in some places.
The Dancing Bears, the sophomore effort, is true to its place in an artist's life. Merwin dispenses with the cleverness but can't quite harness his voice so the poems are opaque in places, oppressive in others. I think I decided to hate the second book somewhere in the middle of East of the Sun ans West of the Moon.
Finally, in Green with Beasts we catch a glimpse of the Merwin's voice. The Annunciation stopped me cold:
And I moved away because you must live
Forward, which is away from whatever
It was that you had, though you think when you have it
That it will stay with you forever. Like that word
I thought I had known and held surely and that it
Was with me always. In the evening
Between the shadows the light lifts and slides
Out and out, and the cold that was under the air
Is darkness you remember, and how it was
There all the time and you had forgotten.
It carries its own fragrance. And there is this man
Will take me as a woman, and he is a good man,
And I will learn what I am, and the new names. Only
If I could remember, if I could only remember
The way that word was, and the sound of it.
There he is. There's that cadence we look forward to with a WS Merwin poem. The one that travels us.
By the time I got to The Drunk in the Furnace I didn't need much more to go on. It may not be his best work but he has picked up momentum and confidence in his voice so when the poems work they are very good and when they don't they're forgivable.
What I found remarkable about the last book in this collection was how Merwin seems to revisit the aspects he experimented with in the first two books but integrate them into what he learned along the way. So he pulls off clever forms like he uses in Some Winter Sparrows and Catullus XI but they are grounded and feel like expressions rather than gimmicks (or showcases).
All in all I enjoyed this volume but I don't think it's essential reading unless you have a weird hang up about tracking certain artists from their beginnings like I do.