Unexpected Development

Merz is keenly attentive to daily life as a revelator of essential

truths, and thus uses poetry as a way of returning closer to it; and

“to unbecome what was.” Merz' “nearing” and “distancing” processes

take place inside us, through language. By summing up so gently and

exactly (but also sometimes drolly or pointedly) the movement of

duality, Merz enables us to sense more fully, time and again, what it

means to be alive: that “strange exhilaration within,” as he puts it

in another of these splendid poems so vividly and resourcefully

translated by Marc Vincenz.