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Seanachie: A Boston Irish Storyteller and Part-Time Shaman
Books about place, magic, Faeries, Ireland, sex, God, and love
Currently reading
New Orleans as It Was
New Orleans after the Civil War
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (complete: First & Second Series)
Bright Dead Things: Poems
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Desire: Poems
Selected Poems 1976-2012
An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry
I Am An Executioner: Love Stories
An Artist of the Floating World
Garden Time
This slim volume of Merwin's work contains certain gems. I was struck by "The Sound of It," a poem lamenting (or maybe just remarking) on the fact that the stopping of a dog's bark or a day's rain is not itself heard, but rather only the silence or what replaces it, or what was always there that the bark or rain caused us not to attend. Also by the ultimate poem, "The Present," in which two leaving the garden nevertheless simultaneously reach for a senseless gift neither can keep, but laugh when their hands strike each other while so reaching.That said, the poems in the second half of the book devolved into a murkiness, in which Merwin largely lost the power of the specific and tangible image and instead noodles in a kind of haze thanking his lucky stars for his late-in-life love or remarking with wonder on his old age. Neither the love nor his old age are presented vividly, so the effect is largely maudlin.
