★★★★★ 5
What Merwin Thought Represented Him Best
Format: Paperback
If one volume could sum up adequately W.S. Merwin's artistic development and illustrate his place in American literature with some justice, "Migration" does the job. At least as importantly, it gives us the poet's own opinion on the poems for which he might want to be remembered, much as Nathaniel Tarn inspired Pablo Neruda to do in the selection of Neruda's poems that Tarn oversaw. I bought "Migration" at roughly the same time as
and
and cross-referenced his selection from those titles in "Migration" against the whole. While I still have one or two favorites that did not make the cut, I found the choices he made consistently better-inspired and more timeless than the poems that surrounded them (though overall Merwin has remained a consistent and astonishingly fine craftsman throughout his career). For those who want to go further back than Merwin's more recent books for Copper Canyon Press should not be disappointed.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2016
