Here I am once again with my dry mouth
At the fountain of thistles
Preparing to sing.
Merwin’s first eight books of poetry would later be collected into two omnibus volumes: The First Four Books & The Second Four Books. Those books are all short enough that they can fit in an omnibus and still stay under the four-hundred page mark. But the division between the volumes, which falls between The Drunk in the Furnace and this book, his fifth, is so apropos as to seem almost contrived. Merwin’s first four books certainly had different stylistic flourishes but they all go together in some ways, in terms of subjects and basic stylistic choices. But with The Moving Target, Merwin enters his second phase, the phase that would come to define his work through the sixties and continue to influence it for the next decades. There’s still some of his longer work here, A Letter from Gussie being a particularly great example of his character based writing. But Merwin begins to move into his more abstract and minimalist poetry here in a big way and, in my opinion, the book is a little messy, pretty unfocused and not entirely successful. Well, he did call it The Moving Target and that title fits perfectly. He doesn’t have a handle yet, in my opinion, on the minimalist voice he’s moving toward and the mixture of his original style and the surprising minimalist poems makes the book feel disconnected. It’s an interesting transitional work and there are moments of greatness here, as there always are, but on the whole, this isn’t a particularly good book. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – transitional work finds Merwin clinging to old habits with one hand and reaching for something different with the other; scattered and lacking by comparison with his other works. 2 ½ stars.