This is OK. It has the virtues, and most of the failings, I expect from mainstream US poetry since the 1950's. Very few disappointments, but also no surprises. It isn't attracting a lot of comment (so far) - so instead of being midly critical (my first thought), I think I might go for it with a trowel. I guess the harder I poke, the more likely Merrill's fans will come out in force.
The death of an elderly relative is something we can all map our own experience onto. But I don't see anything here which makes Merrill's gran any more fascinating than one of my own. Merrill's gran draws blueprints for railway stations as she dies. Mine knitted. I don't think either of them could have held an audience on Oprah with those activities.
And does this poem really describe a railway station as 'triumphant engineering' and suggest that a dying lady has an 'artful smile'? When I find journalese in a poem I want to know where the irony is, I want to think twice about those slack and formulaic expressions - and understand that they are not slack and formulaic at all.
It isn't working for me here. 'Triumphant' and 'artful' look slack and formulaic. If someone can throw me a line, I'll be grateful.
The pun of the title:- which might be a virtue or the old girl's name - led me to expect rather more than I am getting. The prospective defunct has been about a bit:
In her time
She’d traveled, seen the world
Precisely: she has been in Paris, Rome, and Cairo (I don't think it is clear whether she ever actually made it to the Valley of the Kings of not). It isn't much to show for a lifetime: not even a Grand Tour. I suppose the Thomson destinations might be a joke: but not a very funny one, and rather cruel in the circumstances.
From where I stand the poem says not very much, though it says it elegantly.
My real problem is those opening lines:
“All this is very tiring,”
The old, old woman sighed:
“Another railroad station…”
Which one today? In her time
This is within a breath of being the jaunty trimeters which introduce Robert Southey' After Blenheim or Milton Hayes' Green Eye of the Little Yellow God:
http://poetrymoment.blogspot.co.uk/2...t-southey.html
The words may seem serious, but the tune is pure music hall.
Perhaps this is a very subtle poem indeed, snared with double takes and pits of sardonic entrapment - all of which I am missing. Or else it has serious problems with lexis, with tone, and with metre.
The essay supplied hasn't convinced me yet.