Reviews for The Vixen

The average rating for The Vixen based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-24 00:00:00 Matt Ammerman Hypnotic 12-syllable or so non-end rhymed lines in an unpunctuated, epigrammatically precise run-on-sentence style that often engages with landscape and nature, memory and lifetimes (not the dread of death so much as an awareness of the lived span). Striking use of verbs so the mind's eye is constantly moving, seeing. I know that for many years Merwin lived in the Dordogne and much of his imagery, the habits of rural people, the moods of landcape, the rituals of daily life, come from that time before he moved to Hawaii. Merwin is among my very favorite poets, up there with Philip Levine, Anna Akhmatova, Pablo Neruda and Philip Larkin to mention a few. I particularly recommend the poems "Fox Sleep," "Romanesque," "The View," "Old Walls" and "Upland House." Moving on now to his earlier Travels.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-09 00:00:00 Marineau Carl 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.