The Pupil: Poems

by W.S. Merwin

Book Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and "one of the greatest poets of our age ... the Thoreau of our era" (Edward Hirsch) comes a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event that captures the spiritual anguish of our time.

Hailed by Peter Davison in the Boston Sunday Globe as a poet who "engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match," W...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375709649
• ISBN13: 9780375709647
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Best Merwin yet

Hopefully not to surpass his credentials, I must comment on how wonderful this poetry is. I love it. I keep these poems on the back of my mind at all times just to remember them and how I felt reading them. Merwin is so exceptionally good at copying the moment into our lives through himself, using the poetry of the spirit to communicate something beautiful deep inside of us all.

straight opaque

W S Merwin is a great poetic genius, & this book is my favorite of what I've read by him. He writes with uncompromising exactness & economy... & I don't think there's any punctuation in the whole book. The flaring experience of the first poems becomes a kind of alembic or magnifying glass focusing of the physical world into frictionless thinking in the journey to the last few blank pages. Poems such as the waltzingly elliptical "To the Spiders of this Room" & exponentially metaphorical "Flight of Language"... & all the rest...exhibit his lexical mastery; opening lines such as "Mist iridescent over the rice fields", the brilliant imagination. As a sidenote...is the poem "The Marfa Lights" in this book a hark back to James Tate's poem "Marfa"...?

A transcendental Experience with one's self

This is one of the greatest books of modern poetry. It is a book for a quiet Sunday afternoon, sitting alone, let the words flow and guide one to the pervading essence. I can't begin to write as wonderful a review as Mr. Pipper wrote. I second everything he said and feel that as impossible as it may seem this poem makes one feel that you the reader are special for the reading of it and one wonders if there is another alien in the universe who can think or feel these words. The pupil is the poet, his childhood musings, not literal but as points of departure to create (what was that wonderful word Pipper used -- "capaciousness") -- yes that's it, a three dimensional experience of time and space. The entire book should really be read from cover to cover as the effect is transforming and accumulative. Now if you think I said anything, you're as crazy as i am but to experience this poem is to make friends with yourself all over again.

If transparency is to survive...

The Pupil does for the brief, meditative lyric what Merwin's Travels did for the elegy and The Folding Cliffs for the historical narrative, and that is to live as perhaps the only examples of those forms to attain the stature of greatness and beauty in the last 25 years. I hope they presage a new possibility in verse, but I don't know of another living poet writing even close to this well out of a faith in the transparency of the word, except maybe some late Creeley. I don't mean this to say that Merwin is dated, more that it must somehow still be possible, since he does it, to write referential poetry and poetry with clearly stated ideas in it without being boring. He often seeems to me like a rarified, or purified, ghost of what used to be considered human to human communication, alive somehow in a space we more remember than encounter, where there were transpersonal signifiers that allowed us to understand something of each other even as we slip away from the understanding and from each other. The poems themselves sometimes function as an elegy for this belief, but I hope it's premature, not eulogy. That said, I find it difficult to write about Merwin, in that his poems seem to mean exactly what they say, to float ethereal and wraithlike in the mind's capaciousness, a loveliness one fears to touch or think about. You can't read these poems if you're nervous, or looking to find impressive things to say about them, or enter Derridean chains of substitution, and in that regard, they become so transparent, so self-evident, as to enter their opposite and become as opaque as reflecting onyx. As much as I hate to say so, they hint toward the belief, normally misguided, that poetry this beautiful has to come from a spiritually realized person. I'd rather just consent to the idea that the defining lines of The Pupil are from the Marfa Lights, about how it is the light, not the darkness, that everyone feels the need to explain, and so here is a collection of poems of darkness like that, the darkness glimpsed in a just opened mouth, the word spoken as music and its reference as perhaps a shadow music in near perfect unison. The only poems that seem to handle this kind of writing this well are Rexroth's meandering mountain and river poems of cloud and light (only with a deeper and quieter engagement with human transiency), and what I'm able to imagine of the great Sung and Tang Chinese masters through the layers of sensibilities, translations and my dictionary Chinese. When reading these poems one is brought into a quiet center, or shadow or seam, between sorrow and beauty that exists through these expressions but cannot be expressed. This poetry is exquisite. I'd strongly recommend you buy it, calm down, and let it work its magic.