W.S. Merwin, "a formidable American poet who for more than 60 years labored under a formidable poetic yoke: the imperative of using language--an inescapably concrete presence on the printed page--to conjure absence, silence and nothingness," died March 15, the New York Times reported. He was 91. Merwin "was equally known for his work as a conservationist--in particular for his painstaking restoration of depleted flora, including hundreds of species of palm, on the remote former pineapple plantation in Hawaii where he made his home."
One of the "most highly decorated poets in the nation, and very likely the world," Merwin was the U.S. poet laureate from 2010 to 2011; won two Pulitzer Prizes; a National Book Award; the inaugural Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry; the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; and the PEN Translation Prize, the Times noted.
Merwin published nearly three dozen volumes of poetry, along with essays, short fiction, memoirs and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam and other poets. His books include Garden Time; The Essential W.S. Merwin; The Lice; The Carrier of Ladders; The Shadow of Sirius; Migration: New and Selected Poems; The Moving Target; The Compass Flower; The Rain in the Trees; The Moon Before Morning; Unframed Originals; The Ends of the Earth; Summer Doorways; and The Lost Upland.
Michael Wiegers, editor-in-chief at Copper Canyon Press, Merwin's longtime publisher, said, "While we have lost a tremendous friend, the loss to American poetry is even more profound. From the stylistic inventions he introduced to the catalyzing force of his work in translation and international poetics, his influence on American poetry has been without equal."
In a tribute posted on the Paris Review blog, Edward Hirsch wrote that Merwin was "a poet, a prose writer, and a translator. He was completely sure about his vocation. He was the most international of American poets, and the most down to earth, literally: he knew more about the natural world than anyone else I've ever known.... He was over 50 when he moved to Hawaii. He discovered it and it discovered something in him. He found a place, a way of being to believe in. I found the landscape too overwhelming to write in. He dug in--tending the land, tending his poetry.... William Merwin was an American original. He is like a great pine tree that has fallen. His work is going to live on, but I can't get over his loss."
Filmmaker Stefan Schaefer, who made the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, shared out-takes from the film with the Merwin Conservancy showing the poet reading 12 of his poems.
From Merwin's poem "For the Anniversary of My Death":
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what