I wake in the dark and remember
it is the morning when I must start
by myself on the journey
I lie listening to the black hour
before dawn and you are
still asleep beside me
So, over the last two months I’ve been really immersing myself into Merwin’s poetry. Over a couple of months, I read his first thirteen books of original poetry, spanning the first forty years of his career. This was always going to be the one I stopped at and maybe it’s a good thing because this is honestly the most disappointing one yet. I’ve loved a tremendous amount of his poetry and liked a lot that I didn’t love, but this is, I think, the worst of the thirteen books I’ve now read. He’s trying some different things here in the realm of narrative poetry. I feel like the centerpiece of the book is The Real World of Manuel Cordova, a poem that stretches to over fifteen pages and I found it to be pretty bad. Much of the poetry here feels really uninspired and things aren’t helped by this being his longest book and featuring some of his longest poetry to date. Manuel Cordova is the longest poem in the book, but there are a number of poems that stretch for five pages or more and that’s just really long for this kind of poetry. This one is decidedly average. 2 stars.
tl;dr – featuring some surprisingly lengthy poems, this book finds Merwin working in a mostly uninspired way. 2 stars.