Relaxing

I’ve just finished Merrill’s 1988 sequence The Inner Room in the chunky Collected Poems and find myself making progress of a twofold nature: I’m around the two-thirds mark of the volume, which means I’m not likely to give up now having come so far; and I found myself, finally, grasping and enjoying whole poems, not just bits here and there. In fact, of the five sections JM divides The Inner Room into, there were two I found highly accessible: the Play in One Act, The Image Maker, that comprises Part 2, and the Prose of Departure of Part 4 with its strange blend of prose and haiku – I assume modelled on Basho (?). Plus I found myself at home in a number of the individual poems in the other three sections. Maybe even the most demanding poets loosen up a bit as they move into old age, feel a bit more relaxed about speaking directly – though he was only 62 when the sequence was published, hardly in his dotage.