Merz is keenly attentive to daily life as a revelator of essentialtruths, and thus uses poetry as a way of returning closer to it; and"to unbecome what was." Merz' "nearing" and "distancing" processestake place inside us, through language. By summing up so gently andexactly (but also sometimes drolly or pointedly) the movement ofduality, Merz enables us to sense more fully, time and again, what itmeans to be alive: that "strange exhilaration within," as he puts itin another of these splendid poems so vividly and resourcefullytranslated by Marc Vincenz.