As Old As The Hills: W.S. Merwin's The Shadow Of Sirius

The show keeps going. I am not one to scramble too quickly onto award bandwagons but when a legend like Merwin wins another award you have to pause and take a look.

Like Daniyal Mueenudin's In Other Rooms this collection of poetry by W.S. Merwin gets the distinction of being listed in the top five of the year. Again. No numbers to further delineate.


The Shadow Of Sirius by W.S. Merwin. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN: 9781556592843. Hardcover. $22. You know the drill. If you click the picture above and purchase the book I get paid. A pittance mind you, is still something.

I have a longstanding quarrel with a particular literary misconception (see how I color the argument already?). In relatively short order it goes like this: Clichés are detested because they are tired and overused, which is the concept I take issue with. Sure, descriptions like “Big as a barn” and “So hungry that you could eat a horse” are exactly as above: tired and overused. Some clichés need rest. They glow with the heat of their overuse and never fail to annoy those that are aware of them.

There are other clichés, briefer ones consisting of single words, that aggravate writing school teachers and poetry editors. Dark. Light. Day. Night. Moon. Sun. Star. Lightning. Wind. Breeze. Song. Echo. Shadow (they hate this word with particular energy). No doubt, these are well-travelled words. Every would-be poet’s first poem contains at least one conjugation of the above set. I won’t deny that. What I will contest is the notion that these words, fired off by so many poetasters, are then off limits to real poets.

The cliché is found in the poor usage. The words themselves are some of the best going.

I felt vindicated on Monday (a feeling we rarely experience at the dawn –add that word to the list- of the work week). W.S. Merwin was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His most recent collection, The Shadow of Sirius, beat out a strong field of offerings to claim this country’s biggest award for poetry.

He did so by using, in almost every poem, words like shadow, dark, song, night, wind, etc. etc.

I will quote a stanza from my favorite poem in the collection, “The Piano.”

“each valley walking a different echo
out of the narrow vibrant shadow
between the piano and the wall that emerges above it
papered to be wheat fields without wind
with no horizon and with a smell of walls and night”

The words are there. No hiding them. Echo. Shadow (somewhere a man in a tweed jacket shudders). Wind. Night. Merwin however ignores the conceptions of cliché or overuse and brings them full bear, containing their primal luster. The night is a daily (ignore the irony). Yet when conjured forth as a smell related to walls in a well-known room it changes into a memory and from there it evolves into reflection and thought.

This poem struck a chord with me (heh) because my mother plays the piano. I remember the days of my childhood growing up in Florida. Late in the hot afternoon I’d come in from baseball or whatever sport I was playing (sometimes just chasing lizards) and I would hear her playing “Fur Elise” or “Rhapsody In Blue.” The Beethoven particularly comes to mind. Merwin successfully pulled those memories forth, and he did so with supposedly tired words.

Cliche is not the right word. Elemental might be more apropos.