The Carrier of Ladders

The Carrier of Ladders gathers poems written as W. S. Merwin moved decisively away from the more traditional verse of his earlier career toward the stripped down, unpunctuated style that would define the rest of his work, poems built from myth, dream, and a mourning for vanishing languages and vanishing species that reads, in hindsight, as some of the earliest ecological poetry to reach a wide American audience.

Merwin abandons punctuation almost entirely in these poems, letting line breaks and breath carry the grammar instead of commas and periods, which gives the verse a drifting, incantatory quality closer to oral prophecy than to written argument. The book's recurring subjects, old myths retold at a slant, languages and animals disappearing without anyone quite noticing, and a self that keeps dissolving into landscape, all move toward a single concern: how much is being lost, quietly, in the middle of what most people still call progress. Merwin wrote much of this work during the Vietnam War years, alongside poets including Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and Allen Ginsberg who were turning American poetry toward open protest, and while The Carrier of Ladders rarely names the war directly, its grief for what disappears without ceremony carries that same era's unease just beneath the surface.

Reading the book means slowing to Merwin's own unhurried, punctuation free rhythm, letting each poem's meaning gather across unbroken lines rather than arrive in discrete, end stopped sentences. It suits a reader drawn to myth, ecology, and a genuinely visionary, incantatory mode of American poetry, patient enough to let a poem's sense settle rather than announce itself.