The Vixen: Poems

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.