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Je n'aime pas dans les vieux films américains quand les conducteurs ne regardent pas la route. Et de ratage en ratage, on s'habitue à ne jamais dépasser le stade du brouillon. La vie n'est que l'interminable répétition d'une représentation qui n'aura jamais lieu.

The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) - W.S. Merwin

Always the setting forth was the same,

Same sea, same dangers waiting for him

As though he had got nowhere but older.

This book wraps up Merwin’s first four books and they were later published in a single edition called The First Four Books.  They come to somewhere around two-hundred & fifty pages all together; these are definitely slim volumes of poetry.  This one kind of picks up right where Green with Beasts left off with an opening section of poems about the sea, ships, etc.  These are even better, I think, than the ones in Green with Beasts; the one-two punch of Iceberg & Foghorn is maybe the best back to back pairing of any of his poems yet.  After the sea poems run their course, things broaden out, but the best stuff here is character based.  Merwin hasn’t really focused before on sketching people in all their idiosyncrasies, so it’s a lot of fun and surprisingly good humored, something else Merwin hasn’t really been to this point.  It’s getting harder to tell which of these books is better, the farther I go into Merwin’s bibliography and that’s a great problem to have.  He’s crafted another masterpiece here and put a period to this phase of his career.  When next we see him, he’ll have left the beaten path behind him and artists do like to evolve, so who can blame him?  But still, that path has been a joy to walk.  4 stars.

tl;dr – Merwin’s fourth book marks the end of his first period and it’s a high note to go out on.  4 stars.

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