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The Vixen: Poems

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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.

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.

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.