The Moon Before Morning: the Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin
About This Novel
Merwin, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, wrote "Garden Time" when he was nearly ninety years old. He gradually became blind and unable to write, so he dictated it to his wife Paula. The book contains 61 poems. As was his usual signature style, there is not a single punctuation mark throughout the collection. Most of the poems in this collection are short poems, focusing on the passage of time and the continued impact of past memories on current life. He stitches together the distant past and the present, and switches freely between the two, displaying the airy lightness and Zen-like enlightenment that are consistent in his poetry. "The Moon Before Morning" includes his works when he was in his eighties. Some readers commented on this collection of poems and said: "Merwin's poems discuss aging, memory, life, death and legacy. These are topics that a craftsman thinks about when he is ninety years old. If these were spoken by a young man, they would not have such weight."
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