Reader Reviews for The Shadow of Sirius:
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Summary: Reading Sirius = Serious Reading
Comment: Today we flew back from St. Petersburg to Baltimore and my wife caught me weeping on the plane. I don't know if any of you have ever done something like this, postpone for two years a personal encounter with a prize-winning book that you are just dying to read, one that has been in your possession the entire time and is sure to be terrific, one that has been written by one of the great poets of the 20th century, just because you need a special occasion to read it. This past weekend proved to offer all that I required: a brief visit to my 98 year old father in the coolish but sunny terrain of Florida, the company of all our children and our 10 month old granddaughter Olivia, not to mention a temporary escape from snow-blindness, cabin-fever and the worst winter on record.
W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) won its author his second Pulitzer Prize at the age of 82; he already had won a National Book Award for what looked to be his finale, Migration, a New and Selected (2005) and a first Pulitzer for a book he had written in the 1960s, The Carrier of Ladders (1970). Although poetry is thought to be a young man's game, there are some notable exceptions (c.f. those also-rans W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens) and Merwin's career appears to be a sterling example: The Shadow of Sirius is his best book. The passage of time and the on-rushing twilight have sharpened his attention to the major and eternal subjects of poetic inquery and the same forces have shorn his work of its early surrealistic veneer and unnecessary obscurity. Many of the familiar devices remain: the relatively short lines, the absence of punctuation, the attention to natural phenomena, the preciousness of memory. Merwin is not fond of simile and the same metaphoric symbols (moon, night, river, wind) are used over and over. Despite the spareness of the music, or perhaps because of it, the poems are extremely moving, filled with a calm Buddhist-like acceptance, a type of wisdom and spirituality that no amount of preaching and teaching can inculcate with such force and humility (see the gnomic parable "Far Along In The Story" from Part 1). If you have ever heard Merwin read, you can immediately appreciate how well each line communicates the gentle formality and breath control of his speaking voice. The Dog Star of the sailor's summer sky, long a symbol of passionate intensity, Sirius itself makes no appearance in the book, the more mundane and human passions of the hot-tempered and hot-blooded season of life fading into memory as the summer fades into fall and winter. The book is divided into three sections, the first devoted to childhood memories, the second discreet ruminations on death through meditations on the deaths of his dogs (Sirius again), before it reaches a grand integration in its final third, justifying Merwin's claim that he, and by extension all of us, is only what he can remember. Discussing a photograph in the poem "A Likeness" (from Part 1), Merwin concludes:
but the picture has
faded suddenly
spots have marred it
maybe it is past repair
I have only what I remember
But Merwin is too wise not to understand the unreliability of what we remember, even if it is the basis of our art and our humanity. Further, this unreliability is rooted in the very moment of a memory's making. In "No Shadow" (from Part 3) he returns to a valley that he first saw more than half a lifetime ago. Observing the clouds and the sky reflected in the valley's river, the final couplet reads:
the river still seems not to move
as though it were the same river
Some of the poems interpolate rhyme ("Good Night" from Part 2) or more often employ self-contained prose poems as central stanzas ("Recognitions" from Part 3). Merwin has a long history of translating poems from several different languages and the outliers in Sirius to Merwin's normal working methods reveal his deep mastery of a variety of accepted and nonce forms. Here are the wonderful opening and closing lines of "Recognitions":
Stories come to us like new senses
a wave and an ash tree were sisters
they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost
.....
and they wrote to each other every day
without knowing where to send the letters
some of which have come to light only now
revealing in their old but familiar language
a view of the world we could not have guessed at
but that we always wanted to believe
Having just re-read D.H. Tracy's wonderful essay on "Bad Ideas" in verse (Poetry magazine, November 2006), put me in mind of a homophonic mis-reading of Merwin's title (and this brief note) as The Shadow of Serious. Tracy advances the theory that there are two types of poets, those who treat their ideas with seriousness because they deeply believe in them (whether they are correct or not) and those writers who are not serious, selecting their subjects and themes because the topic is trendy, pleasing, superficially poetic, or one that the poet's audience expects him to address irrespective of his commitment to it. As an example he offers the religious poetry of a figure such as Hopkins for whom any critical discussion of his poetic method must include due consideration of his fervent Catholicism. In such writers it is not enough to parse lines and take their world view for granted, to assume that it is a mere appurtenance attached to the scaffold of lines and words rather than the driving force behind the creation of the art. Such makers mean it when they speak and the sound world of their poetry is wholly believable; in this sense, as in many others, Merwin qualifies as a truly serious poet, one for whom the existential situation of man in the universe is met with calm acceptance and the certainty of nature's wisdom.
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Summary: First Thoughts on Merwin
Comment: Darkness, in a simple sense, is really just a blanket register for all that which is beyond human perception. Too many writers never seem to outgrow the infantile fear that something unseen is equivalent to something obliterated, and as such shroud their demons in black and fears in the absence of light. W.S. Merwin, however, does not have this hindrance and as such is fit to observe the beauty of human awareness by writing about just how little the light reveals and how much one is forced to conjecture from the shadows in his book of poems entitled The Shadow of Sirius.
What is perhaps most striking about the poems is how simple they appear; very few of the poems are over a page in length and yet one can easily read them for hours before they feel as if they feel their meaning with anything approaching completeness. Much of the poetry deals with memories of the author that, drawn from his mind, have been allowed to manifest onto the pages as images formed from little marks of jet black. A talented writer can evoke the beauty not just of what is seen, but also what might ordinarily be beyond immediate perception. Merwin can do this magnificently with astoundingly few words. His poems "The Pinnacle" and "A Broken Glass" are ample evidence of his talent for revealing what might otherwise be missed. But what are truly impressive are the poems that manage to show the marvel of that which is believed beyond human perception, things which are unseen that no amount of searching or observation can bring one to a definite conclusion about their nature. Poems like "No," for example, which muse on the fate of the dead, force one to look at the shadow of a tombstone, wonder about what it might be covering, and then come to the realization that one has only the very faintest idea. While such a realization may make one feel lost amidst a universe of ambiguities, it can also make one understand that what little one can perceive is all the more precious.
Merwin's poem "Calling a Distant Animal" from part two of the book is a particularly strong example of a poem that captures the beauty of an attempt to find something tangible. The poem begins with a bit of mimicry, a single part of the unnamed bird's call, "one note," that the narrator attempts to sound by use of his own desire to see the creature again. The note is "plucked from a string of longing," which leads into the second stanza, bringing the reader to the formation of the actual call by transforming the longing of the first stanza into an actual lengthening of the "instrument's" string, "tightened suddenly from both ends," for only a moment before the tone is struck out, and in being sounded, removed from the actual birdsong and fails to achieve the desired effect. Since the call is only reminiscent of the actual call, it can be known only in "the old night," where the bird once was. The narrator can only recognize the familiar silence of the creature's absence. Though the bird's presence remains unaccounted for, the non-presence of the bird is recognized as an object by the poem's end, so the unsuccessful call still remains a summoning sound. And Merwin conveys this idea, which could easily be pondered on for pages, in under seventy words.
Whether or not one is a "poetry person" there is much to be appreciated about this marvelous book. One need have no qualms about purchasing it.
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Summary: Enchantment
Comment: This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I have never been a huge fan of poetry, but this book is full of poems that go directly into the heart and soul. The beauty and connection of each poem to me and my life lifted this book to number one for me. I am a voracious reader, so this is the highest praise I can give. Well worth reading for the beginner in poetry reading or the most advanced. Run, do not walk, to the nearest store and obtain a copy. You will love it~ You will be enriched beyond measure by it.
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Summary: Love these poems
Comment: I find Merwin's poems in The Shadow of Sirius delightfully sensitive and intelligent. Poignant and lovely, sad, full of joy, and so insightful... a deep appraciation of the life of a human being.
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Summary: Merwin Inspires
Comment: I don't always know what the hell he's talking about but I want to. The poems I understand illuminate and provide perspective on a wide range of subjects. The poem Just This covers the earth sciences, astronomy and the concept of time. When I got this book I had been working my way through McPhee's Annals of the Former World and was stunned by Merwin's distillation (Annals runs almost 700 pages). Would I have understood the poem without reading Annals? Maybe not, but the depth of understanding he displays in the poem convinces me that I should continue to read his work. Besides, after reading a few poems I actually wrote one of my own.
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