Nearer than the flies or the herders, the lost son,
Hesitant, stumbling among the swine (unto this
Has been likened the kingdom of heaven), hoping
For little, takes the first step toward home.
Green with Beasts continues Merwin’s climb; it’s better even than his excellent second book. It’s divided into three parts; in the first, all the poems are about animals while, in the second, things broaden out substantially to a variety of subjects and in the third the poems all revolve around the sea. I think that what Merwin does really, really well here is marry beautiful descriptive poetry to beautiful metaphysical poetry. So, for instance, he’ll start a poem talking about a dog and he’ll describe the dog in really beautiful ways in terms of its physical form and behaviors. Then he’ll move into the realm of emotions and leap right off into a musing on the nature of sorrow or something like that. There are some startling great poems here. The book starts off with a chilly, foreboding one about the Leviathan of Job, a creature from the black depths of the sea. A retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the second section is particularly strong. The Annunciation is probably his most ambitious and most impressive poem yet, a lengthy meditation on the moment when the Angel visits Mary to inform her of the impending birth of Christ. It kind of lives in the moment when the divine touches the earthly and it’s very abstract and strange and goes for several pages. This is a really, really striking book of poetry and, great as The Dancing Bears was, this is the book that really signals the arrival of a true master of the form. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Merwin’s third collection is his best to that point by a fair margin; beautifully descriptive, beautifully metaphysical, this collection signals the arrival of a true master. 4 stars.