Garden Time

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. Merwin composed the poems of Garden Time as he was losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated the poems to his wife, Paula. In this gorgeous, mindful and life-affirming book, he channels energy from animated sounds and memories to remind us that ‘the only hope is to be the daylight’. This late collection written in his late-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Switching between past and present, he shows us a powerful and moving vision of the eternal, focusing on images of mornings, sunsets, shifting seasons, stars, birds and insects to capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world.

In a poem about Li Po, ‘now there is only the river / that was always on its own way’. In another poem he dreams that ‘the same river is still here / the house is the old house and I am here in the morning / in the sunlight and the same bird is singing’. He remembers when ‘dragonflies were as common as sunlight / hovering in their own days’ and recalls ‘a house that had been left to its own silence / for half a century’. In a poem of wonder entitled ‘Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud’, he writes: ‘I keep looking for what has always been mine / searching for it even as I / think of leaving it.’

Poetry Book Society Recommendation