[An American poet and educator, Stern was one of the judges for the 1994 Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize. The other judges were Deborah Digges and Stephen Dunn. In the following essay, Stern offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Travels, concluding that this is Merwin's best collection yet.]

What I find myself responding to over and over in W. S. Merwin's Travels is the unique combination of tenderness and knowledge—closeness, love, pity, coupled with cruel history, true narrative, accuracy. It is not a new combination for Merwin, but the focus is somewhat different. The spaces are, as it were, filled in, and the poet, as man, is totally accountable; and though the investigative heart of the poet goes from one obscure place to another, the voice is deeply personal and the sadness is almost unbearable.

There is overwhelming courage in these poems, the courage of finally facing oneself whole, intact and entire. Sometimes it is an epiphanous moment, a revelation, as in "The Hill of Evening," when, after a night of celebration, an "old woman's birthday party," the speaker discovers in the grass a "new sickle / bright as water and the blade / glittering with the dew" and he stands there startled:

        not knowing whose it could be how it had
        come to be there what I was to do
        with it now that I had seen it

the power of the experience reinforced by the simple literalness at the end:

       as you know no one steals anything here
       and it must have been partly to see
 
       whether it was really there that I reached down
       and picked it up cool as the dripping grass
       to carry home and lay on the table
       here in front of me and tomorrow I must
       try to find who it belongs to

and sometimes it is a moment of longer duration, as in "Another Place," the bitter, delicate poem about the lost father, burning his sermons, driving off with a "nicely spoken young helper," bickering with the trustees, entering the Sunday School room alone in the night. In "Writing Lives" Merwin says

       that if a single moment could be seen
       complete it would disclose the whole

His search is for that moment.

The title Travels indicates continental and even cosmic movements, but I am fond of, and would like to call attention to, those poems that do not have great movement in them but are more in the way of meditations, particularly the ones on "otherworldly" plants and animals. In "The River," the crocodiles are shown, albeit in a park, a zoo, as creatures of vast power and remoteness, yet what can only be called sensitivity; in "So Far," a baby gecko is examined, loved and humanized, in a tender poem that has on the one hand the searing pity of Roethke's mouse and on the other the precision, lightness and irony of Marianne Moore's; and in "The Palms," the great tree is totally humanized, in shameless disregard of Ruskin.

      He says, of the palms:
      most of the flowers themselves are small and green by day
      and only a few are fragrant
      but in time the fruits are beautiful
      and later still their children
      whether they are seen or not

and:

      much later the elephant
      will learn from them
      the muscles will learn from their shadows
      ears will begin to hear in them
      the sound of water
      and heads will float like black nutshells
      on an unmeasured ocean neither rising nor falling
 
      to be held up at last and named for the
      sea

As for the long voyages, they are more in the way of journeys of the soul, inward journeys rather than outward ones, so whether we are listening to the bells or getting off a train or moving across the whole of Russia, it is the same yearning, the same remorse and expiation. "The Lost Camelia of the Bartrams" and "Inheritance" are cases in point. The first poem celebrates a tree that was discovered and then lost forever, at least in its natural setting, and would survive only by seeds and cuttings. It was not only beauty that disappeared but being itself. The second describes how "as many as four thousand / varieties of the opulent pear / … were to be found barely a century / ago … in the fields and gardens of France," and how a "jury picked no one / remembers how all men and none of them / young to say just how many / kinds of pears should exist in France." The poem ends:

       … everything they
       savored is gone like a candle in a
       tunnel and now it was always like this
       with our tongues our knowledge and
       these simple remaining pears

"Lives of the Artists" is the purest example of this loss. It describes how a Native American boy, Little Finger Nail, himself a warrior and a former prisoner of the whites, painted in a book the desperate and heroic struggle with "the blue spiders"; how the book was found tied to his back with strips of rawhide after he was shot, and how one page only was on display in a museum, "under glass." It is an extraordinary poem in which the poet himself, that artist, stands helpless and a stranger before the first one:

       … red
       lines fly from the neck of
       the horse on which the man with long braids is
       racing and in the white sky are black stars
       with black tears running down from them in
       the lighted silence through which strangers
       pass and some of them pause there
       with all they know

One of the other judges [Deborah Digges] wrote about the quality of translation in Merwin's work, "as if," she said, "the words in each of his poems had undergone a metamorphosis, or as if they arrived here with a little dust of the ancients still clinging to their sandals. Often [she said] the sounds in the poems, too, echo and creak—oracular, like the voice of an exile…. The idioms and quirks of American English have been heightened to allegory. This is our best speech. In this book [she said] the translator's guilt and the translator's sadness are revealed. The distance necessary for so pure an utterance wounds the speaker. Maybe [she said] we can see this in Travels because Merwin has taken on longer poems. In 'Rimbaud's Piano,' 'Lives of the Artists' and 'The Moment of Green,' among others, the speaker's struggle to be present while at the same time holding up the parable, the story that will change him shadows the poems, weeps from the margins."

Of a great range of very fine books, including those by Rodney Jones, Jack Marshall, Lucille Clifton, Jane Miller, Jorie Graham and Forrest Gander, the judges chose this one. My own feeling is that, among the many lovely collections that Merwin has given us over the many years of his writing, this is the finest.