'The work of more than five decades, gathered from 15 volumes, is here compressed into a selection that is more luminous than voluminous. Bulk is not Merwin's style. A fastidious, elegant writer, he is a calligrapher of consciousness, a fine penman aware that he is writing not on parchment but in water… Merwin is the unmistakable heir of the Emerson and Whitman who so ecstatically hymned flux. Like them he wonders constantly at how "all that I did not know went on beginning around me"; and like them he possesses a rare gift for pristine sensation. Yet between him and them there is a difference, evident from the minor key of his psalms, written as they mostly are in what can only be called the "passing tense". That difference is the measure of the history of the American century and of the present American world. As much American Noah as American Adam, post-modern Merwin is aware of launching a porous ark of language. Behind even his most serene raptures lies always the quiet imagination of apocalypse: "I hope I make sense to / you in the shimmer / of our days while the world we / cling to in common is // burning." To which one can only gratefully answer: yes, indeed, this volume does make very good sense.' - M. Wynn Thomas, Guardian ‘The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground’ – Peter Davison, Atlantic Monthly ‘He has attained – more and more with every collection – a wonderfully streamlined diction that unerringly separates and recombines like quicksilver scattered upon a shifting plane, but remains as faithful to the warms and cools of the human heart as that same mercury in the pan-pipe of a thermometer’ – James Merrill