W.S. Merwin: The Whole Grammar of Waiting

A few weeks back, I posted a poem from W. S. Merwin's most recentvolume, The Shadow of Sirius. Well, I've spent the last two weeks going over this book and it is one of the very best books of American poetry I've read in quite sometime.

I haven't caught up with Merwin recently so perhaps I've missed some important changes in his verse. This volume contains relatively short poems (most are less than one page) in extremely plain language, without any punctuation at all. The later forces the reader to slow down, big-time: gleaning sense here takes imposing pacing and syntax that isn't always obvious in the reading.

Much of what is addressed has to do with memory and the past, not surprising as Merwin is into his 80's. Yet it is hardly a trip down Nostalgia Boulevard. There is a bittersweet tone to some of the pieces, but there is also a constant working and reworking of thought, a feeling through words for sense and something just beyond. There is some powerful, powerful verse here in an almost elegiac mode.

Here's another from this fine collection:

A Codex

It was a late book given up for lost
again and again with its sentences

bare at last and phrase that seemed transparent
revealing what had been there the whole way

the poems of daylight after the day
lying open at last on the table

without explanation or emphasis
like sounds left when the syllables have gone

clarifying the whole grammar of waiting
not removing one question from the air

or closing the story although single lights
were beginning by then above and below

while the long twilight deepened its silence
from sapphire through opal to Athena's iris

until shadow covered the gray pages
the comet words the book of presences

after which there was little left to say
but then it was night and everything was known

W. S. Merwin

And this brilliant piece:

Worn Words

The late poems are the ones
I turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight

it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there

W. S. Merwin

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Finally, today is the birthday of Jack Cassady, bassist from Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. Here's a little plea for chemical understanding. Happy B-day, Jack. Enjoy.

dancing butterflies--
my journey is forgotten
for a while

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don