Gifted with prophetic powers, Merwin has been aware, for longer than most, that our nation is headed on a course of environmental and economic self-destruction; and on a more metaphysical level, he has been more sensitive than most other poets to humanity's singular inability to perceive reality as intensely as they might, and thus to use time as effectively as they could. He has been preoccupied with both the public and private consequences of this lessening of time, and he renders the effects of its ineluctable passage poetically in his images. We are "The Last People." (pp. 226-27)

On a more positive note, Merwin can also effect a transcendence of time in his poetry: Certain poetic images or passages impart a sense of timelessness or suspension of time. He attempts to capture the absolute moment of time—a real time or stopped time—in his poetry. This "transcendence...