Present Company

“One of America’s greatest living poets.”—The Washington Post Book World“Merwin keeps his language simple but his perceptions complex. Classical in their lines of inquiry and restraint yet vital in their attunement to the here and now, these personal odes and musings on daily existence and the cycles of life are, by turns, bemused and exalted . . . each poem infuses the collection with buoyancy and light.”—BooklistNow in paperback, W.S. Merwin’s latest masterwork—which reviewers have described as “meditative,” “playful,” and “lithely beautiful”—guides readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Akin to Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, every poem in Present Company directly addresses the people and things of daily life, as in “To the Thief at the Airport” or “To Lingering Regrets.” “To This May” They know so much more now about the heart we are told but the world still seems to come one at a time one day one year one season and here it is spring once more with its birds nesting in the holes in the walls its morning finding the first time its light pretending not to move always beginning as it goes