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Synopsis
This major collection, by a major American poet who has been awarded the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art, is concerned with the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France. "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."
Publishers Weekly
Here is a memoryscape of days spent in a remote part of France: gardens and woods recalled in rich detail, mist which has ``found/ its way without sight into the hoofprints of cows,'' changes of season whence arise a transcendent fox, a snake reclaiming its skin, an old woman with a safebox of ash. Merwin, now 68 (his first collection, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952), outgrew his need for punctuation about three decades ago. Periods and commas, he has said, ``staple the poems to the page.'' And, indeed, freed of pauses and built from long lines that flow seamlessly into one another, these pieces soar with a polished dreaminess that returns to itself in the shape of a worn millstone ``...carved long before in the form/ of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be/ asleep the features worn almost away where it/ had gone around and around grinding grain and salt/ to go into the dark and to go on and remember.'' The present is stitched tight onto the past, the poems are at once pastoral and narrative, and none comes to a definitive end. Instead, each dissipates, the way a complicated flavor dissolves on the tongue. (Jan.)