Katherine E. Young Reviews Merwin's THE VIXEN for 25 Year Anniversary
25 years after it was originally published, Katherine E. Young looks back on one of Merwin's most underappreciated masterworks
Katherine E. Young's retrospective on W.S. Merwin's The Vixen appears in The Adroit Journal. Her newest collection of poetry is Woman Drinking Absinthe available from Alan Squire Publishing. An excerpt from her essay follows. Read the full review HERE.
Is there such a thing as too much good poetry? My uncle, who made a lifelong habit of sending me copies of each of W.S. Merwin’s books upon publication, thought so. “He writes too much,” my uncle would lament each year when the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the few major prizes to elude Merwin during his long literary career, was awarded to some other writer. In a career as prolific as Merwin’s—more than fifty books of poetry, prose, and translation, including multiple literary masterpieces—it stands to reason that not every book can be a great one. Right?
Consider Merwin’s 1996 collection, The Vixen. Coming on the heels of Travels: Poems, winner of the 1993 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, The Vixen is in many ways a quiet book. While the poems in Travels are set all over the globe and vary considerably in form, length, and even appearance on the page, the sixty-four poems in The Vixen, most of them no longer than a page, follow a single form: a long line that starts at the left margin, followed by a second, indented line (which is sometimes enjambed and sometimes syntactically independent of the preceding line), mimicking the appearance of call-and-response on the printed page. (In his original review of the book for Boston Review, poet and critic Richard Howard called it “one poem in 64 sections.”) The look of the poems is neat, tight, controlled. “Quiet” and “controlled” are not synonymous with “lesser,” of course, and for anyone seeking poems that nourish and challenge, The Vixen offers a rich bounty.
ASP Author’s Gift Guide for Book Lovers (PART 2)
Gift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
ASP Authors’ Gift Guide for Book Lovers
Well, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.
Featured Poetry: “Burial at Shanidar” by Elizabeth Hazen
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.