The Lice: Poems

Excerpt from Poets.org: As Jarold Ramsey states in a critical essay on Merwin's work: "What makes The Lice special in a decade of writing that will be remembered for its apocalyptic obsessions is an eerie sense of bearing witness to a world already in mid-apocalypse. These are not portentous poems so much as notations on the experience that it is all but over and done with, that we are merely 'the echo of the future,' and 'tomorrow belongs to no one.'" Many poems in the collection (which was tentatively titled The Glass Towers while in manuscript form) address nonhuman subjects ("For a Coming Extinction," "In a Clearing," "My Brothers the Silent," "The Herds," "In Autumn," "Death of a Favorite Bird," and "Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise"), and others are overtly political ("Caesar" and "The Asians Dying")-qualities that make the poems representative of the spirit of the collection.