Poetry for a New Year : Home at Last : TRAVELS, <i> By W.S. Merwin (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 137 pp.)</i>

In “Travels,” one of the most beautiful and moving collections of poetry of his career, W.S. Merwin displays his narrative gifts (more familiar, perhaps, to readers of his elegant prose) to provide us with a book of deep historical resonance and luminous poetic grace.

These new poems revolve around complex issues of passage--through time’s portals of birth and death, through experience, over the earth and through the natural world. In the poem “The Hill of Evening,” a meditation on aging, Merwin says, “I was thinking again / of age and of what in each season seems / just out of reach just beyond what / is in front of us a kind of ghost / of what we see to which we offer up our days . “

This is W.S. Merwin’s 14th collection of poetry. With each new book we have been reminded why, for 40 years, he has remained a pivotal figure in the literary life of this country. One of our most honored authors, our finest translator of poetry from other cultures, and a prose writer of immense range and power (“The Lost Upland,” his most recent prose work, was one of only nine books selected for the New York Times Book Review’s list of best books of 1992), W.S. Merwin continues to earn his place as one of our most influential and compelling contemporary poets.

Those who know Merwin’s poetry are familiar with its timeless, even mythic qualities. There is often an extraordinary sense of urgency to the language--the densely charged utterances of a Merwin poem--yet his work seems always to revolve around a deeply calm and spiritual gravitational center. An acutely attentive poet, he is invariably a startling and inventive maker of images, one whose spare lines and seemingly stark, unpunctuated stanzas tend to keep the reader off guard, allowing a poem’s phrasings to convey a sense of constant surprise. It is an inspired tactic, as it serves to demand an alertness and complicity of his readers, one which entwines us in the narrative movements of his poems.

Yet Merwin’s much-imitated and exhaustively discussed poetic style, forged in the seminal book “The Moving Target” and honed for the past five years, continues to be mildly revised and reinvented in each subsequent book. In “Travels,” he grants his storytelling impulses a greater freedom even as he continues a major focus of his earlier poetry, an investigation into the interrelatedness of humankind and the natural world.

Merwin asks that we acknowledge and reflect upon our primary relationship with the earth. To this end, he sets us traveling through time and across geography to experience the aspects of passage he and the protagonists of his poetry--many of them naturalists and botanists--have experienced, that we might share their concerns and convictions.

In “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” Merwin speaks as the 17th-Century Dutch herbalist Rumpius (Georg Eberhard Rumpf), who lived most of his life in the East Indies. This ironic apologia could stand as Merwin’s own:

I may have seemed somewhat

strange

caring in my own time for

living things

with no value that we know

languages wash over them

one wave at a time .

From the outset, in his prefatory poem entitled “Cover Note,” Merwin makes perfectly clear his purpose in “Travels.” Playing off “To the Reader,” Baudelaire’s famous prologue poem to “Les Fleurs du Mal,” Merwin addresses us directly:

Hypocrite reader my

variant my almost

family we are so

few now it seems as though

we knew each other as

the words between us keep

assuming that we do

I hope I make sense to

you in the shimmer of

our days while the world we

cling to in common is

burning . “

Merwin’s poems in “Travels” often bear witness to the pursuit or revelation of nature’s secrets, yet the wisdom borne by and born of these “secrets” inevitably reflects one truth--that, after the travels we call our lives, we necessarily return to our true and final home, the natural world.

This seeking after home--or the idea of home--drives many of Merwin’s new poems. In the marvelous piece “Rimbaud’s Piano,” we find the young poet-traveller returning to his mother’s house at Charleville, however briefly, before what will be his self-exile to Africa. Having already abandoned poetry, Rimbaud insists upon having a piano in the house, a somewhat desperate yet poignant attempt to create some sustaining sense of self and home.

In the book’s tour de force, a magical 19-page narrative, “The Real World of Manuel Cordova,” Merwin’s title character is kidnaped in the upper Amazon by a tribe that wishes to make him the heir to their dying chief. They need an outsider, the tribe feels, who knows the intruding “alien” forces of the white men in order to withstand them and survive. As he is groomed to become chief, Cordova is initiated into the rites of the tribe, including a drugged dream-travel in which he begins to discover the alchemy of nature. Cordova is a man who walks along the cusp of the “civilized” and “primitive” words until, at last fearing he’ll collapse into the abyss that separates the two, he escapes to his old “home.”

“Travels” invokes many of these powerful voices, charting passages through time-as-history, as well as time-as-aging. The landscapes here are both physical and spiritual; for Merwin, the two are not divisible. Our choices and responsibilities concerning one concern the other. In recent years, Merwin has emerged as one of the most articulate spokespersons for ecological causes; his work is filled with reminders of our failed earthly custodianship.

In an early stanza of the poem “Fulfillment,” Merwin confronts us with the harsh dilemmas of passage:

but what could we

do to prevent a day from ending

or a winter from finding

us how could we stop a wind

with no home

from sliding into

our sleep or keep our parents

from death

or ourselves from leaving .

The poem concludes with this solemn coda:

summer is done and the last flocks

have

vanished and from the sleepless

cold of the unremembered river

that

one voice keeps rising

to be heard once once only once

but there

is nobody listening .

Merwin continues to write, of course, in hope that we are listening. In his superb poem for biographer Leon Edel, “Writing Lives,” he confesses:

Out of a life it is done

and without ever

knowing

how things will

turn out

or what a life is for

that matter

any life at all

the leaf in the sunlight

the voice in the day

the author in the

words.

With the continuing benediction of his poetry, we as Merwin’s readers are able to continue, perhaps more graciously and conscientiously, along or own worldly travels. At the conclusion of “Cover Note,” we discover the poet has armed us with

words that I hope might seem

as though they had occurred

to you and you would take

them with you as your own.

Now, he seems to imply, it’s up to us.