The Moon Before Morning

W.S. Merwin is arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century - an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. The Moon Before Morning is his first collection of new poems since The Shadow of Sirius (2009), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize. This new book written in his mid-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Telegraphing between past and present, Merwin shows us the now still ferries of Weehawken Bergen Yonkers that first brought him home from the hospital as a baby, the early schoolhouse now destroyed, and the playground where his mother ´with an orphan´s uncertainty / feeling that she was a stranger / wanting to do the correct thing´ refused to leave his side. He shows us, too, the feel of the trade winds as they move in on a Saturday morning in Hawaii, the silhouette of a palm against a darkening sky, and the once young hands, now suddenly old, engaged in the familiar motion of picking flowers, offering us, in these moments, a powerful and moving vision of the eternal.