The late W.S. Merwin was something of a contradiction. He was a social poet who shied away from the public square, largely preferring the company of his garden. Merwin's poetry also poses a puzzle: though sometimes difficult to parse at the level of semantics, his poems are not mired in their own discourse. Rather, the verse is shaped by the pressures of reality.

For example, his book The Lice (published in 1967 as the Vietnam War was escalating) largely avoids explicit references to its turbulent context and, yet, moral imperatives haunt the work at every turn. The opening lines of the poem "Bread at Midnight" are but one example:

The judges have chains in their sleeves
To get where they are they have
Studied many flies

Even at their most aggressively surreal, Merwin's poems ring with allegorical truth. For many, the 1960s ushered in a radical self-questioning of middle-class values, and the poems in The Lice  abound with moments that powerfully give testament to that fact.

You can hear the hearses getting lost in the lungs
Their bells stalling
And then silence comes with the plate and I
Give what I can

Feeling it’s worth it

For I see
What my votes the mice are accomplishing
And I know I am free

Merwin was ambivalent towards overtly political poetry. Perhaps what accounts  for the undeniable power of his voice is a lyrical insistence to "tell all truth/but tell it slant" (as Dickinson admonished). In short, the poems speak to us from odd angles, even as they bring critical truths into focus. An award-winning translator, Merwin makes choices here that are also revelatory of this oblique approach. His early attempts at translation included work of the French Symbolists, who believed the most sincere poetic utterance  is often the most impenetrable.

In 1973, Merwin turned his translator’s eye towards the east. The resulting book, Asian Figures, is perhaps one of the most fascinating examples of literary translation from the late 20th century. Drawing on puzzles, riddles, aphorisms, and proverbs from Japan, Korea, China, Burma, Malaysia, and the Philippines, Merwin attempts to tease out some of the similarities between poetry, (compactness, unity of thought) and instances of vernacular wisdom. Such epiphanous moments—often just two lines in length—delight and instruct in equal measure:

Acorns arguing
which is tallest

Neglect is a dog
In a dead man’s house

Silent
like the thief the dog bit

Owing to the tendency towards brevity and concision in Merwin's poetry, we can see why such aphorisms may have excited him. And, putting aside Merwin’s own strategic ambiguity, at their core, his poems are direct appeals to the commonsensical.

With respect to the environmental crisis, Merwin's poetry is unequivocal in its ethical perspective. Perhaps Merwin's lifelong passion for gardening was not so much a respite from the world as it was a means of personally connecting himself to what is, finallly, most important—our beleaguered planet. Long before ecopoetics flourished into a literary movement, Merwin’s jeremiads warned us about the consequences of our global folly. Some lines from the poem "For a Coming Extinction" sum up the stakes nicely:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
 

Read more from the NYPL 2019 Best Poetry Books Committee.