The Vixen Book

Though I'm in no way religiously tied to any poetic form by ideology, there is far too much flat narrative poetry around.
How many time have I read material that makes it into a prominent magazine in which the words are well chosen, the enjambment thoughtful, the subject matter important (in its small way), and the poem like hundreds of other well-crafted poems that bore me to death with their predictability.
Merwin is brilliant because, confident and well establish, he writes in such a way that you are alive in his world, which in this case is a reflection on the years he spent in France. It used to be that Merwin was known as the guy who got rid of punctuation, but such a facile riff has been blown away by the fact that Merwin is one of our greatest writers.
His narrative technique is honed by his many years writing and is full of surprises. Each sentence yields precious and semi-precious stones, even after continual excavation.
I read this book intensively over a month and a half and finished it thinking: To write like this is a miracle. There is only one other writer I've felt about that recently and that is Witsawa Szymborska. Okay, and Samuel Beckett.