In many of the reviews written about The Shadow of Sirius, as well as the copy on the back of the book itself, the line that is most often quoted as a summation of the collection is the last line of “A Likeness”: “I have only what I remember.” It is a dark line, implying that the present is useless, or perhaps unavailable. It is also a bit melodramatic, no? This statement sounds like the end of a deathbed speech, after which a montage of the speaker’s life is shown (the runt Christmas tree, the best fish, the wedding, and finally, the speaker locking eyes with his wife while still reading to their child, because, you see, he has read the book so many times) and then the credits spill down.
It is not a bad line, read on its own or in the context of the poem in which it appears, but for me it doesn’t work as a de facto subtitle to the book. There is a dispossession of the present implied in the line that runs counter to what Merwin is up to. I thought that Zach was right on when he said that Merwin “uses nostalgia to engage with the present.” For Merwin, the present and the past are not kept in separate boxes; rather they ventilate each other and are each enriched by the other’s presence.
In his poem “Photographer,” Merwin describes the cleaning out of a photographer’s studio after he has passed away, in which they carry out “nests of bedding clothes from their own days / shards of the kitchen there were a few bundled papers / and stacks of glass plates heavy and sliding / easily broken before they could be got down”[.]
The plates, someone recognizes, are panes on which undeveloped images are still trapped, and when they are exposed to light, they reveal “apple trees flowering in another century / lilies open in sunlight against former house walls / worn flights of stairs before the war / in days not seen except by the bent figure / invisible under the hood / who had just disappeared” [.]
If we trust “I have only what I remember,” then we could see Merwin as a substitute for the photographer, under the hood, using his poems to capture moments of the past allowing us readers (the developers of the images) to view a life gone by with the light of our attention. But the poems are only partially a record of the poet’s past. They also have things to say those of us who are driving to work or trying to sleep or reading a blog. The book is about loss, but instead of merely doing the work of mourning, it also consistently points us back to what is still left. Unlike the static nature of a photograph, Merwin’s poems shuttle back and forth between this moment and the past. In fact, the poems often fuse the two, having them occur concurrently: “As those who are gone now / keep wandering through our words.”
Not to pile on to my nitpicking of the promotional material on the back of the book, but the blurb excerpted from a review in The Guardian uses my least favorite blurb word: “unflinching.” It is overused and in this case I think it is also inaccurate. Not to imply that these poems flinch in the face of important subject matter, but rather in the sense that when we say that something is unflinching we imply that it is brave or intrepid. The way Merwin fuses of loss with the present doesn’t seem brave in these poems, but simply the natural outcome of living a long life. The voice in this book isn’t unflinching because whether to flinch or not when facing loss wouldn’t be a decision to be considered. It is a given.
If I had to nominate an appropriate subtitle for The Shadow of Sirius, it would be the last stanza of the poem “Eye of Shadow”:
I touch the day
I taste the light
I remember
Memory interacts dynamically with the present, occurring according to what the day gives it. It is a generous way of conceiving of the past, focusing on how it comes to bear on the everyday. In other words, memory is not just memorial. It is a way of paying attention.