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.