The Rain in the Trees

Book excerpt: A volume of poems concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and with history and how the world endures it—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch). A literary event—a new volume of poems by one of the masters of modern poetry—The Rain in the Trees is W. S. Merwin's first book since the publication of his Opening the Hand. Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem—so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently) Opening the Hand, he has produced a body of work of great profundity and power made from the simplest and most beautiful poetic speech. Merwin can now rightfully be called a master, and this book shows in every way why this is the case.