Michael Peverett: we exchange a few questions (W.S. Merwin)

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

we exchange a few questions (W.S. Merwin)

Tahina spectabilis at the Merwin Conservancy, Maui (Hawaii)

[Image source: https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/11/featured-palm-tahina-spectabilis/ . Jason Denhart (Merwin Conservancy Executive Director) with a young specimen of this critically endangered palm, native to Madagascar.]

With over 2,740 individual palm trees, featuring more than 400 taxonomic species and 125 unique genera, with nearly 900 different horticultural varieties, W.S. Merwin’s garden is recognized as one of the largest and most extensive palm collections known to exist on earth. (The Merwin Conservancy)

Here W.S. Merwin died on 15 March 2019, aged 91. He was at his off-grid house in north Maui, set in the garden he had created on a deforested former pineapple plantation. In 1977 the site had been 3 acres, but Merwin later extended it to nearly 19 acres. Here he planted over 3,000 trees, mostly palms.

(Michael Carlson's Guardian obituary madly claims that Merwin "replanted some 3,000 acres".)

It wasn't his first act of restoration. He had purchased the dilapidated farmhouse Lacan de Loubressac, above the Dordogne, for just $800 in the early 1950s, about the time of his first poetry collection. (We can pay a virtual visit to the farmhouse in this 2018 article by Michael Wiegers: https://lithub.com/windows-to-the-world-at-ws-merwins-old-french-farmhouse/ .) This was where he wrote e.g. The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders. Here too he bought some more acres over the years, preserving a fragment of the landscape around him.

End of a day

In the long evening of April through the cool light
Bayle’s two sheep dogs sail down the lane like magpies
for the flock a moment before he appears near the oaks
a stub of a man rolling as he approaches
smiling and smiling and his dogs are afraid of him
we stand among the radiant stones looking out over
green lucent wheat and earth combed red under bare walnut limbs
bees hanging late in cowslips and lingering bird cherry
stumps and brush that were the grove of hazel trees
where the land turns above the draped slopes and the valley
filled with its one sunbeam and we exchange a few questions
as though nothing were different but he has bulldozed the upland
pastures and the shepherds’ huts into piles of rubble
and has his sheep fenced in everyone’s meadows now
the smell of box and damp leaves drifts from the woods where a blackbird
is warning of nightfall Bayle has plans to demolish
the ancient walls of the lane and level it wide
so that trucks can go all the way down to where the lambs
with perhaps two weeks to live are waiting for him at the wire
he hurries toward them while the sun sinks and the hour
turns chill as iron and in the oaks the first nightingales
of the year kindle their unapproachable voices

This is a farmed landscape. The managed walnut trees and the lucent wheat are part of what composes it, so are the sheep and dogs. And though the poem reacts with hostility to this active, pitiless neighbour, countrymen like him undoubtedly lie behind how this beloved landscape evolved in the first place, just as much as behind the shocking fresh scars of this particular day.

This poem comes from The Vixen (1996), a whole collection set around the Dordogne farmhouse. Merwin made later visits to it, but this collection of 64 poems feels like a farewell, on a magnificent scale.

A good few of them are available online, as from his many other collections: a testament both to the generosity of Merwin's estate and publisher (e.g. the many poems on the Merwin Conservancy site) and to the wide range of people who engage with his poetry. Here's my working list of the contents of The Vixen, with links to the poems that are available to read. (I could have added more if I'd included The New Yorker, but that requires subscription.)

Fox Sleep https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38456/fox-sleep

Oak Time https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38768

Gate https://lemonhoundcom.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/michael-redhill-on-w-s-merwin/

Threshold https://merwinconservancy.org/2017/03/threshold-by-w-s-merwin/

The West Window

Authority https://hellopoetry.com/poem/14496/authority/

Walkers

Ill Wind

Net

Garden https://merwinconservancy.org/2015/08/poem-of-the-week-garden/

Letters

Commemoratives