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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
W.S. Merwin is indisputably one of our finest living poets. The two books preceding The River Sound (The Vixen and The Folding Cliffs) are nearly flawless. Their thematic coherence and sustained, lyrical intensity are the culmination of Merwin's signature style: long, loping lines--frequently enjambed--with minimal if any punctuation. In these fluid poems, he has found the ideal form for his preoccupation with "the open unrepeatable / present."
The New York Times Book Review, Melanie Rehak
...he's performing what James Merrill knew was the most important task of all, taking care of the "need to make some kind of house / out of the life lived out of the love spent."
See all Editorial Reviews
W.S. Merwin is indisputably one of our finest living poets. The two books preceding The River Sound (The Vixen and The Folding Cliffs) are nearly flawless. Their thematic coherence and sustained, lyrical intensity are the culmination of Merwin's signature style: long, loping lines--frequently enjambed--with minimal if any punctuation. In these fluid poems, he has found the ideal form for his preoccupation with "the open unrepeatable / present."
The River Sound, while thematically building upon this preoccupation, does not quite reach the same stylistic virtuosity, though the book's shorter poems do exhibit Merwin's facility for transparently evoking the sensory details of a particular place, person, or memory. This rendering is especially poignant because many of its poems, such as "227 Waverly Place," are about Merwin at 70 taking leave, perhaps for the final time, of places and people that have become a part of him:
When I have left I imagine they willMerwin falters, however, when he attempts to merge his open style within a traditional rhyming, iambic structure. In "Testimony," a 60-page autobiographical poem, the rhyme scheme and the sentiment can occasionally border on cliché: "The year I will be seventy / who never could believe my age / still foolish it appears to me / as I have been at every stage..." Yet within the context of Merwin's entire body of work, it's well worth reading. --Emily Warn
repair the window onto the fire escape
that looks north up the avenue clear
to Columbus Circle long I have known
the lights of that valley at every hour
through that unwashed pane and have watched with no
conclusion its river flowing toward me
straight from the featureless distance coming
closer darkening swelling growing distinct
speeding up as it passed below me toward
the tunnel all that time through all that time...
The New York Times Book Review, Melanie Rehak
...he's performing what James Merrill knew was the most important task of all, taking care of the "need to make some kind of house / out of the life lived out of the love spent."
See all Editorial Reviews
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Citations
(learn more)
15
books
cite this book:
- Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan Poetry) by Sarah Suleri Goodyear in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Poetry as Labor and Privilege: The Writings of W. S. Merwin by Edward J. Brunner in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Emerson, Romanticism, And Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic "Light of All Our Day" by Patrick J. Keane on page 455, and Back Matter
- The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France by W. S. Merwin in Front Matter
- Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Hous