The Shadow of Sirius

The Shadow of Sirius returns W. S. Merwin to memory, lost dogs, light, and the deepening quiet of late life, written in the unpunctuated lines he had refined since the 1960s so that one thought flows into the next without the usual signposts of a period or comma to mark where a sentence ends. The effect is a chantlike steadiness that blurs the line between recollection and present perception, so that a memory and the moment of remembering it can occupy the same unbroken breath.

The book's title comes from the way a bright star casts its own faint shadow, an image Merwin uses to suggest how the past continues to fall across a present life long after the thing itself has gone. Dogs recur throughout as figures of loyalty and loss, mourned with the same grave tenderness Merwin brings to the deaths of people, and working without punctuation forces a reader to supply the pauses a poem would otherwise mark, which slows the pace of reading and keeps attention fixed on the sound of each line as it arrives.

Reading The Shadow of Sirius means entering a long, unhurried attentiveness, poems written from inside what feels like a lifetime of listening rather than any single dramatic event. It suits a reader drawn to poetry of old age written without sentimentality or fear, a book that treats what passes and what remains as equally worth the same close, quiet attention, and that rewards a slow reading more than a quick one.