SOURCE: "Skating on Paper," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 578-95.

In the excerpt below, Kitchen examines the convergence of style and theme in Travels.

W. S. Merwin's most recent book, Travels, is permeated by a healthy nostalgia for what has been lost to us—a sense of history, an identification with place, a connection between generations, the old forms in art. Everything is seen as though through the window of a passing train, briefly illuminated and then receding into the world of memory. The preface poem, "Cover Note," appears separately and sets an elegiac tone (whose echo of Baudelaire signals as well a literary nostalgia):

        Hypocrite reader my
        variant my almost
        family we are so
        few now it seems as though
        we knew each other as
        the words between us keep
        assuming that we do
        I hope I make sense to
        you in the...