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The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions Paperbook)

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Although a mystic and an intellectual, Merton shines as a poet as well. Rarely spoken of, his poetry reflects his simple and eloquent beliefs regarding God. To read his poetry is to glimpse a bit of the Truth that he sought to explain.

This is a book for all seasons. It chronicles Merton's poetic career from start to finish, which close up can seem to change and veer abruptly. From the distance of this chronicle it looks more like the regular flow of those low domed hills his monastery calls home, the Kentucky knobs. Working in an astonishing variety of modes and moods, the care and control of Merton's poetic output is consistent and always thoughtful, respectful of the reader.

Merton started recording his haunted poetic impressions of the modern world in the years at Columbia just leading up to his conversion. A sample is collected here, leading up to a struggle with a view of a wintry Lent which, developed in a slightly different vein, becomes "Lent in a Year of War," the keynote to his first published set, Thirty Poems. The resurrection of the fragment before the first book gives an astonishing window on Merton the man, the poet, the monk, the later social critic and protester: they were all the same guy, and they were there from day one. He did not "turn from the world" then later "turn to it" as the editors of his complete journals suggest. He never left it and carried its issues with him more deeply into ground, as it were, where they ripened over time. Lent is an "evening of sinless murders" the young man annouces, an image fusing the precise matrix in the modern world that he set his spiritual-poetic career against, with some note of active determination -- not passivity.

There are four published sets between 1944 and 1949. They still constitute a vast ground for explication and sensitive critical commentary, for which there is hardly room in a review. However, these four sets are rich and classically constructed poems which even, without the rest of the book, would make the short list for anybody's desert island. Now the sounds and sights and prayers of monastic days fuse with that long and bottomless meditation on the world and time that Merton craved, and that a career in teaching with a Columbia degree could not have begun to satisfy -- or at least not without deadly struggle -- as anyone who works in the world must know. But the key thing again is religious imagery not as a shelter or a denial or a flight, but as a full frontal explication of the issues that drove this poet "underground," so to speak. In "Ode to the Present Century" it is modern man who is crucified, demonically on his own most cherished petards:

How have you hammered all your senses into curses,
Forever twisting in your memory
The nails of sensuality and death.

An eight year hiatus follows, ending with the transitional The Strange Islands in 1957. Then the Original Child Bomb in 1962, and the explosion of his own poetic output that followed right up to Merton's accidental death at age 53 in 1968. These poems are more generally known, and take on many contemporary issues -- still burning -- with both hands in any mode Merton can get ahold of. They are wild and some of them wildly funny. Merton is about the funniest poet I know so I hardly care who considers him "great" or "major"; I bought this book on publication in 1977 and it comes off my shelf at least as frequently as any other I own. For just that reason: this meditative priest always has exactly what I need, somewhere. It is uncannily as if the book knows me, and I gather many others have had this experience with the writer. It makes him, to an odd degree, a sort of cult writer; among his continuing circle he is probably sighted about as frequently as Elvis. Funny thing, that man from Tennessee and this born again Kentuckian oddly had their fingers on key synapses in this time of flux, and hearty humor grafted upon dead seriousness from the heart was central in both -- one a crooner of ballads and another a bardic scholar. Merton, of course, favored Dylan -- not really all too funny in those days, either, but when you realize he got out of Gethsemani one night to laugh uproariously at "What's New Pussycat" you will be ready for the poet's wild finale, surreal and outrageous. He even had time to look back, as evidenced by a late uncollected poem, "All the Way Down," in which he goes "down/Into the cavern" to the bottom of the sea, "lower/Than Jonas," lower than any diamond mine -- "I thought I was the devil/He was no deeper down/Than me" -- -- But wait:

And when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.

Simply, there is no room to signal here the riches of Merton's grand finale of bell-ringing. The whole book stands there, finally, like a picaresque symphony from an incredibly meditated modern life. Cables to the Ace and The Geography of Lograire, especially, are two astonishing modernist sets that have never gotten appropriate recognition. There are translations, silliness, poems in other languages, "antipoems," protests and rubics for subversive rites, encounters with the East, and more. And always, however surrealistically sometimes set in a mad lost crowd, there always remains the deepest vein Merton mined in his own "dark hole" from the start: the horror point where modern man is confronted with the quite real and still bleeding figure of Christ crucified, walking right up to him.

I feel almost guilty writing this because I truly love Thomas Merton and own many of his books,but,I find much of his poetry obscure and difficult to understand. I wish there was something available,a type of guide that would aid in understanding his poems.

The greatest purveyor of paradoxes since Chesterton writes poems reminiscent of Thoreau and Whitman in a style used by the Beat poets. This new age spiritual guru shows us through his poetry just how much literary talent he had. His poems, both literary and spiritual, are as well crafted as his spiritual works. This is a must for any serious Merton reader.