The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. MerwinCopper Canyon Press, 2008

This is a book of quiet poems, quiet beauty: there’s something of magic and majesty in Merwin’s descriptions of stars, birds, planets, rivers, in phrases like “the green heart of the woods” (p 13). These are poems concerned with memory, with family, with nature, with sight—perhaps mostly with memory: “here surfacing through the long/backlight of my recollection/is this other world veiled/in its illusion of being known,” he writes, in “The First Days” (p 76), and, a few pages later, in “My Hand”: “see how the past is not finished/here in the present” (p 74). I like the grace of these poems, the pace of them, the uncertainty of some of the phrasing (short lines that can be read in multiple ways depending on whether you stress the break or not), the well-craftedness of the images, like the last few lines of “Barrade,” describing a train passing at night: “the strip of yellow windows passed/like days on a calendar/the long rays of their reflections/reaching across the naked earth/a moment and then never gone” (p 101).