Seems like forever since I really did a deep dive into poetry and I think the last time it was William Blake. So, this time I decided to go more modern and, well, lighter than Blake which is pretty dense. So I picked W.S. Merwin. This is his first book of poems and like most first books of poems, it’s not very good. It’s definitely Merwin dealing with all of his influences. There’s a poem explicitly riffing on an Emerson poem, a handful of faux-English ballads, a couple of obviously Chinese influenced poems, not one, but two poems with Anabasis in the title. It’s not awful or anything, but parts of it are pretty labored and it definitely feels like we’re not getting much in the way of Merwin’s own personality here. As first collections go, it’s pretty mediocre, as most of them are, I think. 2 stars.
tl;dr – poet Merwin wears his influences too heavily in his first collection of poems; mediocre, as a lot of first collections are. 2 stars.