You that lose nothing
Know nothing.
The Lice comes during a dark period in Merwin’s life. His growing engagement with politics seems to have affected his view of art and after a friend committed suicide, Merwin kind of withdrew completely from the literary world. He would later say that the poems in The Lice were written by a man who no longer believed in poetry and it’s easy to understand what he means. According to Merwin, many of the poems in The Lice popped into his head fully formed and would simply go over and over in his mind until he wrote them down. The poems here are minimal enough that you can believe it. They’re often just a series of short phrases in short lines, some as short as five or ten lines. But where I found the minimalism of The Moving Target to be too abstract and scattered, The Lice succeeds by giving the minimalism a strong emotional underpinning. The book is dark and bleak; there’s a lot of nature poetry here as always with Merwin, but it’s all taken up with snow, ice and night. The atmosphere of this book is a brutally cold darkness and all of this adds up to a striking, stark collection of poems of despair, emptiness and loss. The Lice is considered by a lot of people to be Merwin’s masterpiece (though he won two Pulitzers for later works) and, while I disagree, I can understand why a person might think that. It's certainly unique in his bibliography and very striking when you’re going through his bibliography, as I am, in chronological order. It’s hard to believe this book is from the same person who wrote the first four books, the shifts are that extreme both stylistically and tonally. Regardless of all that, The Lice is compelling and unsettling in its darkness and its despair. The irony is a familiar one to a lot of artists, I think. A book Merwin didn’t want to write has become his most respected and memorable book for a lot of people. I’m sure he’s learned to live with that. Being a poet, he may see it as the final twist on the book’s dark chill. It’s the book’s last trick, maybe, a stinging period to the darkness it contains. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – a dark and chilly collection of poems about nights of winter and of the soul; an emotional underpinning gives the minimalism a new depth. 3 ½ stars.