Travels - Hardcover

Merwin, W.S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679418903 ISBN 13: 9780679418900

Publisher: Knopf, 1992

Synopsis

Merwin is a major figure in our poetry, one of the few. His first book of verse in five years is an event. It is a very full selection with many sides: brief lyrics and long narratives, all of them marked by a moving and profound sense of the natural world and the presence in it of living creatures. Merwin's language is entirely his own, and his control of it and of the construction of his poems makes for breathtaking work of enduring quality.
The narratives are a departure for this poet, dealing as they do with historical figures: "Rimbaud's Piano" is an extended meditation on the poet; others deal with naturalists such as William Bartram, Georg Eberhard Rumpf ("The Blind Seer of Ambon"), and David Douglas; and in "The Real World of Manuel Cordova" he tells a story almost as enthralling as Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

About this title

Review:

One may imagine Rimbaud late in life at his Sudanese trading post, composing the sort of poems W.S. Merwin offers in Travels, winner of the 1994 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Employing a casually somber prosody of forward-falling lines and parachuted beginnings, and unified by what Elizabeth Bishop called "Questions of Travel," these poems unwind in long sentences reflecting long ideas. If the universe can be glimpsed in a grain of sand, then to Merwin a life of travel can be evoked by a single question, as when the tropical agriculturist Gregorio Bondar, returning from the Amazon to his native Ukraine in "The Moment of Green," is asked,

why he had come home to be shot
which they went on telling him he
seemed to have done and the answer
was something he could no longer
remember now that he was back
where words had always known him.

Swaying between tropic sensuality and spaghetti-western brutality, "The Real World of Manuel Còrdova" narrates the true story of a Spaniard kidnapped by indigenous Amazon River people. Although he ultimately flees, Còrdova is initiated into mystical knowledge in exchange for becoming his captors' go-between with the West, trading rubber to satisfy a desperate thirst for guns. These and other similar long poems illustrate Merwin's theme of renewal through danger, while shorter poems find him overcoming fears of becoming lost or regretting culpability in the many ways we poison the earth. Sonorous as Poe, restless as Bruce Chatwin, Merwin offers new ways of seeing our vulnerable relations with each other and the world. --Edward Skoog

About the Author:

W. S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, where he cultivates rare palm trees. His many works of poems, prose, and translation are listed at the beginning of this volume. He has been awarded a fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (of which he is now a chancellor), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Most recently, he has received the Governor’s Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679418903
• ISBN 13: 9780679418900
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 137