Travels [Paperback]

W.S. Merwin (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One may imagine Rimbaud late in life at his Sudanese trading post, composing the sort of poems W.S. Merwin offers in Travels, winner of the 1994 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Employing a casually somber prosody of forward-falling lines and parachuted beginnings, and unified by what Elizabeth Bishop called "Questions of Travel," these poems unwind in long sentences reflecting long ideas. If the universe can be glimpsed in a grain of sand, then to Merwin a life of travel can be evoked by a single question, as when the tropical agriculturist Gregorio Bondar, returning from the Amazon to his native Ukraine in "The Moment of Green," is asked,

why he had come home to be shot
which they went on telling him he
seemed to have done and the answer
was something he could no longer
remember now that he was back
where words had always known him.

Swaying between tropic sensuality and spaghetti-western brutality, "The Real World of Manuel Còrdova" narrates the true story of a Spaniard kidnapped by indigenous Amazon River people. Although he ultimately flees, Còrdova is initiated into mystical knowledge in exchange for becoming his captors' go-between with the West, trading rubber to satisfy a desperate thirst for guns. These and other similar long poems illustrate Merwin's theme of renewal through danger, while shorter poems find him overcoming fears of becoming lost or regretting culpability in the many ways we poison the earth. Sonorous as Poe, restless as Bruce Chatwin, Merwin offers new ways of seeing our vulnerable relations with each other and the world. --Edward Skoog

From Publishers Weekly

In his first collection in five years, Merwin ( The Rain in the Trees ) focuses on humanity's destructive, arrogant relationship with nature, a subject that gives this work an apocalyptic tone. Less a visionary than a collector and preserver of visions, the poet travels to the now-endangered habitats of indigenous peoples whom he sees living in harmony with the earth, as well as into the past. Merwin continues to use an unpunctuated, heavily enjambed line, which can be very effective--"so we pursued those swift spirits like fire / until they had turned / to smoke blown away and the world where we / had known them had turned to smoke." Sometimes, however, the procedure of breaking lines before predicates seems mechanical: "and when you were here I could see that you hoped / I would have something to say to you about / all that and it was then that we / looked up to see the thin moon now this evening." The rhythm works best in narrative poems, where it becomes dreamlike and intuitive: "and the visions rose / out of the darkening voice / out of the night voice the secret voice / the rain voice the root voice / through the chant he saw his / blood in the veins of trees / he appeared in the green of his eyes / he felt the snake that was / his skin."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (June 21, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679752773
• ISBN-13: 978-0679752776
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.5 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,251,372 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.