By the time you read this
it is dark on the next page
the mourners sleep there
W.S. Merwin entered the 1970s with a bang; The Carrier of Ladders was, at the time of its publication, his longest book I think and it’s also the volume that won him his first Pulitzer. He refused to accept the Prize for political reasons, instead donating all the money to draft resistance organizations. This is certainly a return to more consistent quality after a couple of more or less inconsistent efforts. The darkness of The Lice is pretty well gone and Merwin returns to a more ecumenical view of nature here. There’s a surprising amount of history poems here, something Merwin more or less abandoned completely a while back. A large portion of them deal with the American Westward Expansion and it’s interesting to see Merwin dealing with something different from his usual material. The book starts to lose some steam in the back third or so, but this one still hangs together remarkably well and I think, after the disappointment of The Moving Target and the inconsistency of The Lice, Merwin’s returned to a kind of even keeled across the board quality and his poetry is once again really wowing me. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Pulitzer Prize winning collection is Merwin back in fine form after a couple of less than stellar efforts. 4 stars.