The Vixen: Poems - Hardcover

Merwin, W.S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679444777 ISBN 13: 9780679444770

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

This major collection, by a major American poet who has been awarded the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art, is concerned with the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France. "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Reviews

Here is a memoryscape of days spent in a remote part of France: gardens and woods recalled in rich detail, mist which has "found/ its way without sight into the hoofprints of cows," changes of season whence arise a transcendent fox, a snake reclaiming its skin, an old woman with a safebox of ash. Merwin, now 68 (his first collection, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952), outgrew his need for punctuation about three decades ago. Periods and commas, he has said, "staple the poems to the page." And, indeed, freed of pauses and built from long lines that flow seamlessly into one another, these pieces soar with a polished dreaminess that returns to itself in the shape of a worn millstone "...carved long before in the form/ of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be/ asleep the features worn almost away where it/ had gone around and around grinding grain and salt/ to go into the dark and to go on and remember." The present is stitched tight onto the past, the poems are at once pastoral and narrative, and none comes to a definitive end. Instead, each dissipates, the way a complicated flavor dissolves on the tongue.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Merwin, winner of 1994's prestigious Tanning Prize, returns via poetry to the landscape of southwestern France he had earlier described in prose in 1992's The Lost Upland (Knopf). The present work draws on the pastoral imagery of European village life?fields and vineyards, songbirds, ruins, forests?in an effort to capture "what/ might be escaping us." Beginning in a timeless paradisic mode ("When it seems that the world is made of a single/ summer as it always has been"), the poems often end in the present, where time ("the rim of the hour") and change are inescapable. Merwin's long, unpunctuated lines drive forward, sometimes too relentlessly, into metaphysical dimensions far removed from the earthy fragrances of earth and wildflowers, personalizing the landscape while at the same time transcending it. Part Emerson, part Dylan Thomas, but all Merwin, these poems are both surprising ("lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains") and subtle, wise in the realization that "the way of remembering" is also "the way of forgetting."?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679444777
• ISBN 13: 9780679444770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 70