SOURCE: A review of Travels, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 1, Winter, 1994, p. 133.

Below, Leddy offers a mixed review of Travels.

The themes of the forty-six poems in Travels, W. S. Merwin's first collection since The Rain in the Trees (1988), are familiar ones: displacement, both psychic and geographic, as a primary human condition; the loss and problematic recovery of one's past; nature as cunning consciousness and harbinger of apocalypse. There are many moments that look dangerously like self-parody, moving to a ponderous significance out of proportion to what is at hand. Here, for instance, is a description of coconuts: "many of the fruits are no larger than peas / but some are like brains of black marble / and some have more than one seed inside them / some are full of milk of one taste or another / and on a number of them there is a writing / from long before...