Garden Time

This review was written in September 2016. I've reread the collection three times since, the last time upon learning of Merwin's death in March 2019.

In part dictated to his wife Paula when he was losing his eyesight, William Stanley Merwin's new book of poetry is a heartbreaking elegy to the evanescence of life, a celebration of a life lived through love, and a bittersweet journey into the world of darkness from the world of light and books.

Who knows, maybe Merwin, who turns 89 later this month (on 30 September), will have more poems to give us still, but reading this book is like reading his farewell. From a man who has been remarkably consistent in his art, and even in the company of his award-winning The Shadow of Sirius (2008) and the collected Migration (2004), his latest collection, Garden Time (2016) might be his most breathtaking work yet. In its 96 pages and 61 poems, starting with “The Morning” (which could just as well be “The Mourning” it sounds alike when read aloud), he lets us enter the titular garden, their garden, the place of comfort, quietude, peace and inspiration for him, as if he was saying his last goodbyes to it. And by the time we leave with the last poem, “The Present”, we have realized that for him, those images and memories are a goodbye already due to the loss of his eyesight. “I forget that,” as he writes in “December Morning,”

I am almost blind and I see the piles
of books I was going to read next
there they wait like statues of sitting dogs
faithful to someone they used to know
but happiness has a shape made of air
it was never owned by anyone
it comes when it will in its own time