The Moon Before Morning

it seems you must let them come
so you can let them go
you must let them go
so you let them come

from “A Step at a Time”

Merwin is one of a kind, even my spellchecker once suggested he's actually Merlin. His latest collection of poetry, The Moon Before Morning (2014), arrives six years after the sublime The Shadow of Sirius (2008), but in fact amid a very prolific publication period in Merwin's bibliography: the Library of America published the massive and beautiful The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin in 2013, and Merwin's publisher, Copper Canyon Press, put out The Book of Fables in 2007 and Selected Translations: 1948-2011, translations of the haiku by Yosa Buson (with Takako Lento) and a reissue of Muso Soseki's Sun at Midgnight (with Soiku Shigematsu) in 2013. Not to mention that many of the poems in this collection have been published in the past five years in various magazines, and thus have found their way online.

But a new collection of poetry by Merwin is a sweet occasion. I'm quite new to his poetry, having only started reading him at the time of the publication of the Library of America edition, but even to me a certain voice I know to be Merwin's has presented itself. In this respect, The Moon Before Morning is of the usual Merwin quality. But that doesn't mean that it should be taken for granted. Instead, it's precious that he is still able to find the perfect words to describe the perfect mood, as he has been able to do for so long, “in a language I remember but do not know” (White-Eye), and as he writes in Variation on a Theme, “thank you — — for words / that come out of silence and take me by surprise.”

He writes of life and death as someone who has seen both, and the prevailing image running throughout the collection is that of a solitary frond, taken by the wind, carried to and fro. He's the sage who observes, to whom the words come to, and it's this kind of effortless grace that his writing has that makes him seem so forgettable to others but unforgettably brilliant for the rest of us. I admire art in which the work put into it doesn't show, merely achieving that level of bewildering genius in such a personal mode of expression that it looks like it was improvised on the spot. Nothing wrong with improvisation or revision, mind you, it's the appearance and impression I'm talking about.

My favourite poems at the moment are “White-Eye”, “A Step at a Time”, “Another to Echo”, “The New Song”, “The Green Fence”, “After the Voices”, “Elegy of a Walnut Tree”, “Before Midsummer Above Water”, “Ancient World”, “Wild Oats”, “How It Happens” and “The Wonder of the Imperfect”.

16 December,
2014