Reviews for Travels

The average rating for Travels based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-06 00:00:00 Nathan Johnson Certainly not my favorite Merwin, but it is one of his most interesting books for those interested in seeing how he kept pushing himself to develop his craft. First most of this book is comprised of long narratives about interesting characters, people who would have shared the interests that came to dominate the last 25 years of Merwin's life (and it is worth remembering that he was already an accomplished poet in his 60s when he began devoting himself to the work in the natural world for which he is remembered now). And I don't know of any other book where he does that kind of biographical exploration in verse. Also he had made the move to eliminating punctuation 25 years before this, and had written some masterful poems where line, stanza and sense give you everything you need. Still, it wasn't enough. Many of the poems in this book are in strict syllabics, often arbitrary and complicated syllabic structures much like Marianne Moore's. I get the sense that he was looking for some new way to control his impulses. Yet the syllabics will inevitably throw the poet into some very strange, often fruitful enjambments, as they do with Merwin. But a different poet would use punctuation to keep the syntax under control. Merwin can't do that because he has decided not to use punctuation. So the poems in this book use more conjunctions than I remember seeing in any other Merwin poems, usually simply "and." This gives the poems a hurried, breathy feel, perhaps appropriate for telling a long story about someone else's life, but very different from the feel I remember in the books that came after this one. I have never looked at the later work with the sense of syllabic formalism in mind, and I will have to, but I have never felt this hurriedness in Merwin poems before.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-08 00:00:00 Rebecca Brookes Not my favorite Merwin by a long shot. The poems in Travels are long, complicated, and inaccessible. Nothing like the most recent collections, Garden Time, and The Moon Before Morning, which are just phenomenal. These latter collections showcase Merwins unpunctuated profundity in simple, accessible style. „Travels" shows a poet in flux, before graduating from erudite scholar, before awakening to the power and wisdom of simplicity.