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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS.
Honored as one of the "Best Books of the Year" from Publishers Weekly.
"In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style." --Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books
"Merwin is one of the great poets of our age."-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[The Shadow of Sirius is] the very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy." --Harold Bloom
"[Merwin's] best book in a decade--and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom." -- Publishers Weekly
"Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence." -- Orion
"[The Shadow of Sirius] shows the earthly possibilities of simple completeness in a writer's mature work. More than an achievement in poetry, this is an achievement in writing." -- Harvard Review
The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin's new book of poems. "I have only what I remember," Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound--the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and "our long evenings and astonishment." In "Photographer," Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by "someone who understood." In "Empty Lot," Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can't help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
W.S. Merwin , author of over fifty books, is America's foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: Migration won the National Book Award, and Present Company received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
Author Notes
W. S. Merwin was born William Stanley Merwin in New York City on September 30, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1948 and did some graduate work there in Romance languages. He worked as a tutor and translator while writing poetry. In 1952, his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He wrote numerous collections of poetry including Green with Beasts, The Moving Target, The Lice, The Compass Flower, The Rain in the Trees, The River Sound, The Moon Before Morning, and Garden Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders and in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, the National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Vixen.
He also published essays, short fiction, memoirs, and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, and Osip Mandelstam. Merwin's other works included Unframed Originals, The Lost Upland, The Ends of the Earth, and Summer Doorways. He also received the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Tanning Prize and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He died on March 15, 2019 at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. In his best book in a decade--and one of the best outright--Merwin points his oracular, unpunctuated poems toward his own past, admitting, I have only what I remember, and offering what may be his most personal, generous and empathic collection. Somehow, he manages to dissolve the boundaries between one time and another, seeming to look forward to the past or remember what has yet to happen, as in a recollection of traveling to Europe by boat and seeing a warship I recognized/ from a model of it I had made/ when I was a child/ and beyond it/ there was a road down the cliff/ that I would descend some years later/ and recognize it/ there we were all together/ one time. The poems show the marks of having weathered ...the complete course/ of life, but also feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom: the morning is too/ beautiful to be anything else. Gorgeous poems about enduring love melt time as well, looking toward a moment when we will be no older than we ever were. These are among Merwin's best poems, because, as he says, it is the late poems/ that are made of words/ that have come the whole way/ they have been there. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
With no punctuation and a solitary launching capital letter, Merwin's elegant poems are built to the measure of breath and sweep the page like palm fronds. Yet each word is old, lustrous, and solid. Only a poet as seasoned as Merwin can wrest so much meaning from dark, moon, wake, river, and song. The questions he poses are as old as night, and the answers are forever elusive. The contrast between airiness and earthiness is intrinsic to master poet Merwin's newest poems, lithe works steely in their testing of the mesh of memory and sensuousness; the coil of time, our continuing fiction ; and the ripple of shadows attendant upon the brightest star, the most radiant life. Childhood reminiscences summon the dead and recall the now obsolete; the underworld masquerades as a coal mine or a shadow without form or the darkness that is the mind of day. And Merwin contemplates the earth's verdant singularity in the vault of darkness, our entreaties straying far out past the orbits and webs. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Nostalgia, grief, fear for our planet and a subdued resolve in the face of advancing years arrive together in the Hawaii-based Merwin's 22nd collection of new poems, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. As in all of his verse since the late 1960s, Merwin does away with punctuation, letting line breaks and sense determine syntax and pace. The results suggest whispers, laments, accounts of long-ago memories, even voices from an underworld: "the dead are not separate from the living," he says; "each has one foot in the unknown." Looking back at old photographs and childhood houses, at horse pastures and "splintery unlit" schoolrooms, Merwin represents faint consolations, autumn and nightfall, and a parent's dying words: "All day the stars watch from long ago / my mother said I am going now / when you are alone you will be all right." Lines move forward almost ceremonially, confident in the simplicity of their diction, like "clear water revealing / no color but that of the gray / stone around it." As he has before, Merwin writes gravely of species in peril, among them our own: endangered bats and departed songbirds "were singing of youth / not knowing that they were singing for us." Yet most of the work in this capacious book considers not the earth's mortality but Merwin's own: poems shift from his first years to his most recent (he will turn 82 this September), from the helplessness of a young child to the profound resignations of old age. Stephen Burt's most recent book is "Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry."
Library Journal Review
Having published over 50 books since 1952, Merwin could be excused for resting on his laurels. Instead, he continues to work hard, here offering poems clearly formed in a refiner's fire. "Somewhere the Perseids are falling/ but in the stillness after the rain ends/ nothing is to be heard but the drops falling." Wisely, without bitterness, these poems capture that essential stillness. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.