The Vixen: Poems [Hardcover]

W.S. Merwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 16, 1996

This major collection, by a major American poet who has been awarded the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art, is concerned with the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France. "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Merwin's new book of poems is expectedly dazzling and profoundly of a piece. It is concerned with the people and the countryside of the relatively unknown part of southwest France with which he has been associated for many years. Part lyrical, part narrative, these poems are the work of a master.

From Publishers Weekly

Here is a memoryscape of days spent in a remote part of France: gardens and woods recalled in rich detail, mist which has "found/ its way without sight into the hoofprints of cows," changes of season whence arise a transcendent fox, a snake reclaiming its skin, an old woman with a safebox of ash. Merwin, now 68 (his first collection, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952), outgrew his need for punctuation about three decades ago. Periods and commas, he has said, "staple the poems to the page." And, indeed, freed of pauses and built from long lines that flow seamlessly into one another, these pieces soar with a polished dreaminess that returns to itself in the shape of a worn millstone "...carved long before in the form/ of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be/ asleep the features worn almost away where it/ had gone around and around grinding grain and salt/ to go into the dark and to go on and remember." The present is stitched tight onto the past, the poems are at once pastoral and narrative, and none comes to a definitive end. Instead, each dissipates, the way a complicated flavor dissolves on the tongue.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 70 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 16, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679444777
• ISBN-13: 978-0679444770
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,157,207 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

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gem, September 26, 2005

By 

Billyjack D'Urberville (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Vixen (Paperback)

This is a major work, standing towerlike above quite a bit of rubble of the last 80 years. The modern era of American poetry produced some great effects with its wide open experimentation and daring, propelled by Pound and Eliot and carrying through the 1960s. But in recent decades, one might have wondered what a poet was supposed to do next. Every stunt both stylistic and personal had been tried. We produced our own graveyard school of poets whose death notices, usually by suicide or other misadventure, arrived before their major works.

Merwin, who was there too, now demonstrates what a poet still has to do: tell stories, remember the important days, find the connections, and convey it all with deep feeling and conviction. Each poem in this set is a gem of descriptive remembrance, perfectly pitched. Some years ago we had the gift of Robert Penn Warren going into his grand stride in late maturity. Merwin, entering his own bardic phase, teaches us again something of the fruits of maturity, a lesson too infrequently heard in our great continuing national romance with the young and the reckless, the fast life and the beautiful corpse. Reading and hearing him is something more than pleasure and satisfaction -- it is a real need personally and generally. Spread the word.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Merwin's Best--and Most Original, January 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Vixen (Paperback)

These moving poems stay with you. With their graceful flatness, many feel like strange, shimmering fragments of narrative; there is an interplay of mystery and revelation that opens onto a new--or forgotten--realm of poetic experience.

5.0 out of 5 stars THE SILENCE OF THE REMEMBERED WORLD, December 10, 2011

By 

Gary Ostendorf - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Vixen (Paperback)

LISTENING TO THE SILENCE OF THE REMEMBERED WORLD: One of the basic elements found throughout the subterranean bedrock of W.S. Merwin's recent poetry (and one certainly in keeping with post-modernist literary trends and thought) reveals a deep impulse for the combined use of silence and darkness in response to the elusive process of reconciling the essence of past memories and experiences with the substance of what the present-day world has become.

Merwin's 1995 collection, THE VIXEN, contains poetry that, while lamenting the destructive and mindless effects of a contemporary mass culture upon nature within the setting of a traditionally rural community, focuses on a recollected place in southwest France where the poet spent important and formative years of his life. THE VIXEN, while demonstrating the poet's incredibly rich lyrical gift and full of soaring lines of remarkable beauty and depth, confronts this past via the ever-changing and often senseless miasma of the current moment. In order to filter or deter feelings of an overwhelming sense of absence and disconnection in response to the ecological horrors of what an idyllic and nostalgic place in the past has become in the present, the poet's journey, more often than not, ends in silence and darkness (unable to find the words that might explain, mediate, give form to a distillation or revelation).

One feels that, by attempting to bridge the gaps between the different levels of how one experiences existence via projecting landscapes of the natural world that unexpectedly reshape themselves from the pastoral to the nightmarish and surreal (where one might well imagine the sudden formation of a cloud of monstrous proportions containing the history of all the meaningless acts of human ignorance and avarice for which there have been no proven or effective means of repair), Merwin has been able to come to grips with the terrible discrepancies between his own personal mythology of the past and the unremittingly banal and self-destructive realities of the present. Contemporary poetry--indeed the interior lives of those who love verse and grieve the demise of nature--is much the richer for his struggle.