POETRY IN REVIEW
MERRILL
NIGHTS AND DAYS. By
James Merrill. Atheneum.
$4.50.
J
ames Merrill's last volume of poems,
Water Street,
appeared
in 1962 ;
Nights and Days
is its remarkable successor. There are lines in
the earlier book that might well prepare us for the tone of this new col–
lection:
back into my imagination
The city glides, like cities seen from the air,
Mere smoke and sparkle to the passenger
Having in mind another destination
Which now is not that honey-slow descent
Of the Champs-Elysees, her hand in his,
But the dull need to make some kind of house
Out of the life lived, out of the love spent.
His recent poems often- as these lines do--both invite the imagination
and dismiss it. R eaders of
Water Street
will remember it as marking a
change, new powers expressed in poems that release the force of the
coiled past, a personal past, "earth held up, a text not wholly under–
mined / By fluent passages of metaphor." The sly bows to his own rich–
ness of style are part of Merrill's strength. There is no pretense that the
poet is shedding his skin; he keeps all the playful and rewarding com–
plication that marked his earlier poems, but gains a psychological inten–
sity and authority that is new. American poetry in the past ten years
--quite unpredictably, quite wonderfully-has come to include voices
once heard primarily in our fiction, in novels of the inner life. The gain
in force has been in some cases inseparable from a crude confessional
style that finally lacks any interest as
poetry.
But the real craftsmen have
assimilated these energies slowly, with great certainty, and with astonish–
ing results. I am thinking not only of Robert Lowell, but of Merrill and
