March 2006
Gilbert Purdy
poetry
Present Company by W.S. Merwin
Mere months after Copper Canyon Press has released Migration, W. S.
Merwin’s selected poems (and recent winner of the 2005 National Book Award
for Poetry), the volume is incomplete. Merwin’s latest, Present Company
has appeared, and the poet, a fixture on the literary scene now for over 50
years, begins yet another phase.
It is evident from this most recent volume that Merwin is aging gracefully in
his nature sanctuary on the Hawaiian island of Maui. His once vaunted “sustained
line,” while not altogether given off, is less and less in evidence with
each succeeding volume. He has grown more comfortable with himself with the
passage of years however much he remains skeptical of our cultural ideas of
“self.”
The poems that comprise Present Company are elegies, of a sort, dedicated
“To…” the various people, places and things that have graced
his life. The only tension that informs the book is that between the normal
80-ish desire to speak of “the greater verities” and the long inculcated
post-modern reaction against there being any such thing. The result is some
100 poems of sustained interest regularly punctuated by flashes of unusual insight.
The reader will not have to be approaching 80 in order to recognize the sentiment
of these lines “To Lingering Regrets”:
O lovely and mournful
with downcast eyes
appearing to me as
you are turning away
to stand silent and late
in a remembered light
touched with amber
Some verities would seem in fact to be greater and “regrets” are
among them. Surely those who claim to have none suggest that they somehow have
not grown to achieve their full humanity, a problem which these lines, among
many others, prove Merwin does not share.
What is not in the least universal is the persistent animism of so many of the
poems, in Present Company, each addressing a cherished companion. The
recipient of the poem “To Grief” is as much a being as the recipient
of “To Paula,”“To the Corner of the Eye” as “To
the Next Time.” Merwin is Ulysses and his departed teeth are those companions
who did not survive the Odyssey. He and the few who remain sit beside the hearth.
Sitting there he addresses another companion in the poem “To Smoke”:
you have always been warning
us too late and only
as you were leaving
As for Merwn himself, he would seem to be the most tenuous of the existents,
as evidenced by lines such as these from “To Myself”:
I am sure you
were here a moment before
and the air is still alive
around where you were
The implication (especially in the context of his life’s work) is that
the poet W. S. Merwin is more a cosmos than a person. Over his nearly 80 years,
the abstractions, habits, emotions, identifications, observations and material
components that have populated that cosmos have matured to achieve their own
independent identities. All of them are alive in their own right. By process
of elimination, almost, what is left over is the true self, numinous and ungraspable.
Be a poet cosmos or individual being, or his experiences separate existents
or not, he is sure to have few thoughts about the nature of writing itself.
While Merwin is no exception, he is surprisingly restrained on the topic, and
prone, as always, to address it from his own private dimension. It speaks even
more highly of him, then, that what he has to say “To the Story”
is so insightful both for writing and life:
as it passes before you what you will
never manage to remember later
the missing key
to the present and its unrepeated
life and so you will have to make it up
as plausibly
as you can out of odds and ends of what
someone wrote down or you may remember
if memory
serves you or you will conjure from those same
elements and selves summoned out of some
other country
The narratives of pen and life are both problematical and absolutely essential.
The poet of Present Company has lived a life wrestling with ”the
story.” So intensely so that he has come to understand that the reticence
of a few hard-won words can say more.
Present Company is not among W. S. Merwin’s three or four best
volumes. All the more eloquent, then, the fact that it must be lived in for
a while before all of its nooks and unique corners can be fully appreciated.
More impressive still, it teaches us that even in these harried, careening times,
that so often leave one behind long before one has had the chance to grow gracefully
older, it remains possible with a little luck and a lot of honest questioning
to have a bit of wisdom to pass along.
Present Company by W. S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press
ISBN 1556592272
140 Pages
