The Rain in the Trees

Poems deal with spring, trees, city life, the past, dreams, farms, childhood, rain, travel, insects, superstition, and language

The sounds of wind and rain and the images of trees and pastures form melancholy leitmotifs in the latest volume of lyrics by this master prosodist. All slight and understated, these poems depend on nuance and the emotional color of Merwin's mellifluous language for their effect. They ask one to imagine a world not patently given here, but only suggested by sudden, fleeting illuminations: they comprise "a kind of whispered sighing/ not far/ like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark/ the echo of everything that has ever/ been spoken/ still spinning its one syllable/ between the earth and silence." The love poems in particular are so elusive and wispy they seem hardly to stand alone, but to need each other as a group, as well as a good deal of imaginative participation on the part of the reader. Similarly, his theme of the loss of the archaic earthly Eden through the march of progress is defined by only the vaguest mythical outline. Yet, however muted and minor this collection, one is entranced as ever by the unparalleled discipline of Merwin's silver tongue.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Five years after his last collection, Pulitzer Prize-winner Merwin offers no surprises, just the same steady hand and vision we have come to expect from one of the giants of contemporary American poetry. Mostly short lyrics, with unnamed landscapes, unidentified personas, and a gloss of surrealism, these poems exemplify the style Merwin has mastered over the past 35 years: "On the last day of the world/ I would want to plant a tree/ . . . I want a tree that stands/ in the earth for the first time." Yet his rendering of contemporary scenes is also effective. There has been so much good Merwin over the last three decades that publication of his Selected Poems due this summerwill surely be a literary event. Until then, this new work will keep us. Thom Tammaro, Moorhead Univ., Moorhead, Minn.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.