There are those for whom summer reading is synonymous with plot-thick page-turners, guzzled beachside or poolside, covers splattered with sunscreen. For others, the indolent season takes an opposite tack: It’s all about catch-up, savoring deep dives into the life lists of authors who’ve long been our polestars — especially when death brings a coda. It’s in the spirit of relishing these now-extinguished luminaries’ earlier works that these three collections constitute a summer’s holy trinity.
“The Essential W.S. Merwin” by W.S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon, 200 pages, $18
The fittingest way to fill the silence that followed the death in March of W.S. Merwin, the poet laureate of the United States who received nearly every major literary accolade, is to crack open the collection of his poems and prose deemed “Essential.”
Apt title, indeed, as this definitive distillation traces a poetic legacy that’s been said to have “changed the landscape of American letters,” a compilation spanning seven decades of Merwin’s often spare unpunctuated poetry, translations and lesser-known prose narratives.
Merwin was, is, and always will be essential.
“Through daily practice and attention, (Merwin) has created an incredible model for a way of existing on earth,” writes Michael Wiegers, editor-in-chief of Copper Canyon Press, who was tasked with culling nearly 50 books of Merwin poetry and another eight books of his prose. “His poems have defined for future generations what is possible in poetry and in life.”
That truth resonates through these breathtaking pages, be it Merwin’s urgent pleas to attend to this imperiled planet, or his heart-piercing excavations of the unconscious, as in his miracle of a three-line poem, “Separation,” exposing the raw edge of grief. It’s poetry turned saving grace: “Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
Poring slowly over these pages — essential as they are — just might be the wisest prescriptive, balm for the soul, in the wake of the poet’s final absence.
“Long Life: Essays and Other Writings” by Mary Oliver, DaCapo, 120 pages, $16
The January death of Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, high priestess of seeing the sacred in the natural landscape — be it weeds poking through asphalt or a goosefish stranded at low tide — prompted a great reprise of her most memorized lines, among them, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
But her 2004 “Long Life: Essays and Other Writings,” a slim and lesser-referenced volume, holds a cache more than worthy of slow reading, pen in hand for all the underlining and asterisk-ing that begs to be inked. Poems, which Oliver calls her “little alleluias,” are a “way of offering praise to the world.” Prose, she explains, is more cautious, flowing forward “bravely and, often, serenely, only slowly exposing emotion.”
You’ll find those alleluias sprinkled throughout “Long Life” — and they will take your breath away, even if only a single line, such as this untitled dab: “All the eighth notes Mozart didn’t have time to use before he entered the cloudburst, he gave to the wren.”
But it’s the essays, slowly unspooling, that might hold you in rapt attention, even on a lazy summer’s afternoon. Take, for instance, her introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great New England transcendentalist, whom Oliver refers to as “a failed churchman” as she extols his genius and reminds us “the heart’s spiritual awakening is the true work of our lives.”
Traversing the few-square-mile landscape of her Cape Cod environs, Oliver finds beauty — and wisdom and prayer — in the quotidian: the town dump, the rain, her mud-caked dog. She never fails to see the sacred. And she declares, almost as anthem: “I walk in the world to love it.”
“A Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary” by Brian Doyle, Ave Maria, 192 pages, $14.95
This might be the book to reach for on the rainiest, gloomiest of summer days. For it will soon have you humming. It’s joy, it’s whimsy, it’s bursting-at-the-seams blessing upon blessing.
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Tucked in this gem of a pocket-sized book, you’ll find a centenary of prayers for cashiers and checkout-counter folk, for little brown birds in lavender bushes, for folks who all day long “hold up STOP signs at construction sites & never appear to shriek in despair or exhaustion,” and for opossums (“you poor ugly disdained perfect creatures”). Not to mention — take a breath! — prayers in thanks for “hoes & scythes & spatulas & toothbrushes & binoculars & the myriad other tools & instruments that fit our hands so gracefully & allow us to work with a semblance of deftitude.”
And that’s just the start of it.
No wonder Mary Oliver praised Brian Doyle’s “passion for the human, touchable, daily life.” And Cynthia Ozick declared that “to read Brian Doyle is to apprehend, all at once, the force that drives Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and James Joyce and Emily Dickinson and Francis of Assisi and Jonah under his gourd.”
Doyle, a poet, writer and longtime editor of the esteemed Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, died in May 2017, of complications from brain cancer. He’d won three Pushcart Prizes as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
If you wake up and the day happens to be sunny, not rainy, turn to page 66, where you’ll find that Doyle — the prayerful poet for all occasions — has penned a very fine prayer of thanks for suntan lotion: “which smells good; which smells like relaxed; which smells like giggling children in peculiar and hilarious bathing suits; which smells like not-working; which evokes summer.”
Barbara Mahany’s latest book,“The Blessings of Motherprayer: Sacred Whispers of Mothering,” was published last year.
Twitter @BarbaraMahany