WS MERWIN’S lack of punctuation increases the mysterious quality of his vision. The American Poet Laureate, 2010-2011, was losing his eyesight when he composed the poems for Garden Time (Bloodaxe Books, £9.95) from which this sample is taken. There is a sense of shifting time, compassion for the natural world, and a sense too, perhaps, of a lost Eden.

THE WILD GEESE

It was always for the animals that I grieved most

for the animals I had seen and for those

I had only heard of or dreamed about

or seen in cages or lying beside the road

for those forgotten and those long remembered

for the lost ones that were never found again

among people there were words we all knew

even if we did not say them and although

they were always inadequate when we said them

they were there if we wanted them when the time came

with the animals always there was only

presence as long as it was present and then

only absence suddenly and no word for it

in all the great written wisdom of China

where are the animals when were they lost

where are the ancestors who knew the way

without them all the wise words are bits of sand

twitching on the dunes where the forests

once whispered in their echoing ancient tongue

and the animals knew their way among the trees

only in the old poems does their presence survive

the gibbons call from the mountain gorges

the old words all deepen the great absence

the vastness of all that has been lost

it is still there when the poet in exile

looks up long ago hearing the voices

of wild geese far above him flying home.