The Pupil [Hardcover]

W.S. Merwin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 037541276X | ISBN-13: 978-0375412769 | Publication Date: October 30, 2001 | Edition: 1

Hailed by Peter Davison in the Boston Sunday Globe as a poet who “engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match,” W. S. Merwin now gives us The Pupil, a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event.

These are poems of great lyrical intensity, concerned with darkness and light, with the seasons, and with the passing of time across landscapes that are both vast and minutely imagined. They capture the spiritual anguish of our time; the bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong- doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poet’s youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes
from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poet’s sense of a larger mystery:

. . . we know
from the beginning that the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for
—from “The Marfa Lights”

Passionate, rigorous, and quietly profound, The Pupil is an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetry—a book that finds W. S. Merwin’s singularly resonant voice at the height of its power.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fresh from several much-praised book-length works, the impressively prolific Merwin (The Folding Cliffs, etc.) enters his sixth decade as a publishing poet with a decidedly mixed group of new short poems. Recent collections have portrayed the sights and sounds of Hawaii, Merwin's adopted home state, along with memories of his Atlantic coast boyhood. Though both are represented here, they take a backseat to astronomy and the night sky, which occasion many reflections on mortality, transience and the void, delivered in Merwin's familiar, sinuous, punctuation-free sentences. One poem remembers "the year of the well of darkness/ overflowing with no/ moon and no stars"; others portray "the darkness thinking the light" or "the white moments that had traveled so long." Merwin's overreliance on a few key words threatens monotony for the astronomy-centered first half of the book. The poems shine when Merwin finds subjects more specific and concrete than time, space, darkness and light. "Aliens" describes the beauty in a flock of linnets; "Before the Flood" portrays the poet's father as Noah. "Plan for the Death of Ted Hughes" becomes a genuinely original, understated elegy. And the poems near the back of the book are the best Merwin has done for many years among them a meditation on liberal guilt, a strong dawn piece ("the teeth of roofs and the thin trees") and a bitter poem about Matthew Shepard: "This is what the west was won for/ and this is the way it was won." (Oct.) Forecast: Merwin has won about every award there is (Pulitzer, Bollingen, and so on). He has appeared frequently this year in the New Yorker, and his role as ecological advocate has recently raised his profile. All these factors may help boost his new work; the sheer number of recent books, however, risks creating a Merwin glut.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A member of the awe-inspiring generation of American poets born in the 1920s others include John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, and Allen Ginsberg Merwin remains a prolific author of award-winning poetry, prose, and translation, as well as an environmental activist, pacifist, and practicing Buddhist. Known for their elegance and, in later periods, lack of punctuation, his poems include many sonnets and are apt to use soft, echoing rhyme. Lovely to hear, they have their own life on the page, where the tension between syntax and enjambment provides narrative thrust: "the searchlight rays/ groping up through the smoke St. Paul's was still/ untouched though waves of bombs went on falling/ I kept seeing Alice rollerskating." This new collection moves in a seasonal progression from spring to winter, covering old and new territory: a difficult clergyman father, a friendship with Ted Hughes, the murder of Matthew Shepard, the horrific practice of bear-baiting in Pakistan, and more recent friendships in Maui, his adopted home. Light is played against darkness as a central metaphor for existence, and there are poems about stars, comets, and the Marfa lights in Texas, the last an unexplained natural phenomenon representing centuries of human confrontation with the unknown. There is no poet quite like Merwin for portraying human failure in all its poignant irony. For all poetry collections. Ellen Kaufman Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037541276X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375412769
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.6 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,323,941 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

W.S. Merwin is the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translations. He has earned every major literary prize, most recently the National Book Award for 'Migration: New and Selected Poems' and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 'The Shadow of Sirius.' He lives in Hawaii where he raises endangered palm trees.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If transparency is to survive..., January 2, 2002

By 

William C. Piper II (Pennington, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pupil (Hardcover)

The Pupil does for the brief, meditative lyric what Merwin's Travels did for the elegy and The Folding Cliffs for the historical narrative, and that is to live as perhaps the only examples of those forms to attain the stature of greatness and beauty in the last 25 years. I hope they presage a new possibility in verse, but I don't know of another living poet writing even close to this well out of a faith in the transparency of the word, except maybe some late Creeley. I don't mean this to say that Merwin is dated, more that it must somehow still be possible, since he does it, to write referential poetry and poetry with clearly stated ideas in it without being boring. He often seeems to me like a rarified, or purified, ghost of what used to be considered human to human communication, alive somehow in a space we more remember than encounter, where there were transpersonal signifiers that allowed us to understand something of each other even as we slip away from the understanding and from each other. The poems themselves sometimes function as an elegy for this belief, but I hope it's premature, not eulogy. That said, I find it difficult to write about Merwin, in that his poems seem to mean exactly what they say, to float ethereal and wraithlike in the mind's capaciousness, a loveliness one fears to touch or think about. You can't read these poems if you're nervous, or looking to find impressive things to say about them, or enter Derridean chains of substitution, and in that regard, they become so transparent, so self-evident, as to enter their opposite and become as opaque as reflecting onyx. As much as I hate to say so, they hint toward the belief, normally misguided, that poetry this beautiful has to come from a spiritually realized person. I'd rather just consent to the idea that the defining lines of The Pupil are from the Marfa Lights, about how it is the light, not the darkness, that everyone feels the need to explain, and so here is a collection of poems of darkness like that, the darkness glimpsed in a just opened mouth, the word spoken as music and its reference as perhaps a shadow music in near perfect unison. The only poems that seem to handle this kind of writing this well are Rexroth's meandering mountain and river poems of cloud and light (only with a deeper and quieter engagement with human transiency), and what I'm able to imagine of the great Sung and Tang Chinese masters through the layers of sensibilities, translations and my dictionary Chinese. When reading these poems one is brought into a quiet center, or shadow or seam, between sorrow and beauty that exists through these expressions but cannot be expressed. This poetry is exquisite. I'd strongly recommend you buy it, calm down, and let it work its magic.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A transcendental Experience with one's self, January 15, 2002

By 

M. Tierra "MT" (Santa Cruz, California USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pupil (Hardcover)

This is one of the greatest books of modern poetry. It is a book for a quiet Sunday afternoon, sitting alone, let the words flow and guide one to the pervading essence. I can't begin to write as wonderful a review as Mr. Pipper wrote. I second everything he said and feel that as impossible as it may seem this poem makes one feel that you the reader are special for the reading of it and one wonders if there is another alien in the universe who can think or feel these words. The pupil is the poet, his childhood musings, not literal but as points of departure to create (what was that wonderful word Pipper used -- "capaciousness") -- yes that's it, a three dimensional experience of time and space. The entire book should really be read from cover to cover as the effect is transforming and accumulative.
Now if you think I said anything, you're as crazy as i am but to experience this poem is to make friends with yourself all over again.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Merwin yet, June 19, 2003

By 

Adam Chen (Mercer Island, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pupil: Poems (Paperback)

Hopefully not to surpass his credentials, I must comment on how wonderful this poetry is. I love it. I keep these poems on the back of my mind at all times just to remember them and how I felt reading them. Merwin is so exceptionally good at copying the moment into our lives through himself, using the poetry of the spirit to communicate something beautiful deep inside of us all.