Send W.S. Merwin’s ‘Present Company’ to a friend or bring it into your own home, and support The Merwin Conservancy.
“Poetry is really [there] to say what can’t be said. And that’s why people turn to it in these moments. They don’t know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won’t say it, but it’ll come closer to saying it than anything else will.”
— W.S Merwin, interviewed after 9/11
Poetry Month celebrates a way of knowing and seeing all its own. And Poetry Month in these times of distance, stillness, and sheltering in place invites intimate encounters with the everyday objects we often overlook.
Please support The Merwin Conservancy by sharing W.S. Merwin’s Present Company with someone you miss, or by bringing it into your own home.
With a gift $75 or more by April 26th, we will send you or your friend this collection of odes, described by Copper Canyon Press as “fully engaged with living, serious yet playful, inspiring and full of wonder.”
We are grateful to W.S. Merwin’s publisher Copper Canyon Press for providing copies of this special poetry collection.
Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) is a 152-page softcover collection of poetry which reviewers have described as “meditative,” “playful,” and “lithely beautiful,” guiding readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Akin to Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, every poem in Present Company directly addresses the people and things of daily life, as in “To a Departing Companion,” “To a Few Cherries,” or “To the Mistakes.”
Your contribution is particularly meaningful as we steward a special place in these uncertain times. Your support directly impacts our ability to undertake the restoration and preservation work, and to plan the programs that will share this legacy and place with community members, students, and thought leaders in residence.
*Note: if your billing address is different from the address where you’d like the book shipped, please include shipping address in the “Comments” section of our donation form. Cost of shipping is included in the gift.
From Present Company
To the Book
Go on then
in your own time
this is as far
as I will take you
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours
all the time
of course you are not finished
how can you be finished
when the morning begins again
or the moon rises
even the words are not finished
though they may claim to be
never mind
I will not be
listening when they say
how you should be
different in some way
you will be able to tell them
that the fault was all mine
whoever I was
when I made you up
–W.S. Mewin
