Books in English aren’t easy to come by in Mexico, and I have a real soft spot for the late, great W.S. Merwin, so I was very much cheered to come across this book of his I hadn’t ever quite noticed: Finding the Islands, one of many handsome and pleasing-in-the-hands books that North Point Press put out in its epic decade-long run.
This particular volume, published in 1982, is echt Merwin for me. Yes I’ll grant you that he can be sometimes be a mystical, goofy, pineapple-rainforest, Zen Pulitzer kinda guy1—but sweet Lord is he good. And I don’t know what you go to books for, but right now reading a little of the old elf gives me strength and solace, and Reader, I will take it!
Between climate change, war and violence, and far-right authoritarianism, it seems like we’re at some kind of terrible inflection point. I don’t want to read palliative poetry. I want the real stuff. But somehow Merwin, even and maybe especially when zoned out on trees and rain and rocks and birds, almost always gives me the real stuff.2
See for example this one:
Where the cliff
splits
later the dove nests(Cynics, fatalists, quitters: take that!)
The entire book is written in identical three-line stanzas, call ’em haiku if you want, separated by dashes. These supposedly make up poems with titles, but I mostly just read each little stanza as its own poem and I try not to notice or care much what’s going on with them in relation to one another.
Anyway as I went through the book I jotted down, in order, a bunch that moved me and seemed somehow to speak to and apart from this historical moment, and all moments and moment-ness.
I hope they give you strength and solace as well.
Where the cliff
splits
later the dove nests
—
Nobody knows who lived here
the roof is gone
the eastern cloud swallows the stars
—
In high mountains
the late grass
grows as fast as it can
—
All day the wind blows
and the rock
keeps its place
—
A silence begins
soon many feet
are heard running
—
Mountain of
butterflies
hurries
—
Sudden rain
army of light passes
with dark footprints
—
Opening my eyes I see
burning alone in blue
the morning star
—
Moth studies bark
not moving while
daylight lasts
—
Pine needles many as stars
one word for all the trees ever seen
and their lifetimes
—
Steep yellow grass rain
transparent everything I remember
other lives
—
Knothole looks out
through a branch
that has come and gone
—
Child holds hourglass
above his head
and looks up
—
Blue chairs hang empty
waiting in clear
September sky
—
Chainsaw three minutes
hours later in rain
smell of resin
—
Gold trees
turn into
smoke again
—
Suddenly wrinkles appear
on the water
and then are gone again
—
Rain from the full moon
all at once washes away
deep dust
Obviously unfair. The war in Vietnam, the poetry of witness, state violence, the earth, tenderness, translation, ecology—the guy was a prophet. (Also, fam, never forget: Merwin in his heyday was super hot!)
Okay there is one very cringey stanza here that ends with magpies that are, in fact, “dancing in twilight.” And some of the love poems in the second half are hella cringey too. Like I said: I have a soft spot for him. Sometimes you love artists even when they’re embarrassing.