WS Merwin wrote in a lyric register to capture the epic brutality and organized violence of the 20th century
His poems are promontories from which can be seen in one panoramic view the catastrophic storm that sweeps together the Nixon era with the Trump era.
Merwin’s poetry found its visionary calling in the late 1960s and 1970s as an indictment of US militarism.
"Oh come back we were watching all the time
With the delight choking us and the piled
Grief scrambling like guilt to leave us
At the sight of you
Looking well
And besides our questions our news
All of it paralyzed until you were gone"
his poem
“For the Anniversary of My Death,” begins by shivering at the awareness that “Every year without knowing it I have passed that day” when he will die.
His attempts to find a poetry adequate to the position of history’s losers, excluded from the official narratives of events, extends to the planet and its creatures as well as to the injured companies of the human dead. In his poem “In Autumn,” for example:
"The extinct animals are still looking for home
Their eyes full of cotton
Now they will
Never arrive
The stars are like that"
These animals’ seeing eyes have been replaced by a material used to stop bleeding wounds; they are like the dead stars from which light still emanates. It is as terrifying an image for this age of the sixth extinction as might be found.
Merwin's voice, restrained as it is, doesn’t take over and drown out yours. Instead, the very power of Merwin’s poetry is that it passes on its power to its readers, in the same way that it amplifies the voices of the dead and silent.
