Pulitzer Poetry

W. S. Merwin's 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection, The Shadow of Sirius, has been released recently in paperback. I picked up a copy this afternoon and was transported instantly. Here's one of the poems:

Nocturne II

August arrives in the dark

we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

Another collection from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet was on the shelving cart today: A Village Life by Louise Gluck. Here's a poem from Gluck's collection:

Sunset

At the same time as the sun's setting,
a farm worker's burning dead leaves.

It's nothing, this fire.
It's a small thing, controlled,
like a family run by a dictator.

Still, when it blazes up, the farm worker disappears;
from the road, he's invisible.

Compared to the sun, all the fires here
are short-lived, amateurish--
they end when the leaves are gone.
Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.

But the death is real.
As though the sun's done what it came to do,
made the field grow, then
inspired the burning of earth.

So it can set now.