THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS - W. S. MERWIN

Alright, another crack at trying to review a poetry book, something that I find significantly harder than reviewing any other type of book. Mostly because, in basically every case, I liked some of the poems, others sort of washed over me and were forgotten immediately. I picked this one up because it has a reputation as one of the better Merwin collections and because Merwin wrote one of my favorite poems ever, “For A Coming Extinction.” This one did feel more like a collection of poetry in the sense of unified themes and ideas, rather than all the poems a poet wrote in a discrete timeframe. These poems clearly are coming late in Merwin’s life, they are about the feeling of eternity, of going about your everyday life or engaging with nature and suddenly thinking about or feeling the reality of death. These poems are about memory and regret and loss, there's a lot of thinking back on those who are gone and epiphanies that such human losses are peddling. “and here we are / with our names for the days / the vast days that do not listen to us” is a typical example that also shows the sort of coolness that pervades these poems. He’s contemplative but never worked up. He’s sad but not devastated, like he’s looking at his situation with a sense of clear-eyed detachment. The end of my favorite poem in the collection reads: 

“...and it seems that I cherish

only now a joy I was not aware of

when it was here although it remains

out of reach and will not be caught or named

or called back and if I could make it stay

as I want to it would turn to pain.”

HIghlights how he’s aware of both joy and pain but manages to navigate between the two without really feeling either fully. It’s an impressive feat to summon this very specific mood. As a quick final aside, there is a lot of seasonal imagery in this book, lots of invocations of spring and summers turning into fall, to the point where I was sure he lived in upstate NY or New England or somewhere with really defined seasons and tough winters. But no, he apparently lived in Hawaii for many decades? Is he just remembering seasons? Does any part of Hawaii have a “winter” in the sense that most people mean? I suppose it is all metaphor but I found it a strange final twist, when I read the author bio at the end of the book.