Kirjahaku

The Essential W.S. Merwin traces a poetic legacy that changed the landscape of American letters: seven decades of audacity, rigor, and candor distilled into one definitive volume curated to represent the very best works from a vast oeuvre, from his 1952 debut, A Mask for Janus, to 2016's Garden Time. The Essential W.S Merwin includes favorite poems from two Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes; a selection of iconic translations; and lesser-known prose narratives. As the formalism of Merwin's early work loosened into the open, unpunctuated style he developed during the Civil Rights Movement--when urgent times demanded innovative modes of expression--readers can trace the evolution of one voice's commitment to moral, spiritual, and aesthetic inquiry. Across the decades, beyond headlines, policies, and trends, W.S. Merwin's poems point to the lessons that hide in the shadows of sentience.

A collection centered in myth, A Mask for Janus is the 49th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets While Merwin’s poetry as a whole is grounded in the poetic forms of many eras and societies, this first collection is inspired by classical models. Writing in American Poetry Review, Vernon Young traces the poems to “Biblical tales, Classical myth, love songs from the Age of Chivalry, Renaissance retellings; they comprise carols, roundels, odes, ballads, sestinas, and they contrive golden equivalents of emblematic models: the masque, the Zodiac, the Dance of Death.”

From a major American poet -- a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii. The story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers. A brilliant capturing -- inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands -- of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through the exploitative incursions of Europeans and Americans. An epic narrative that enthralls with the grandeur of its language and of its vision.

A strikingly beautiful book of poems from one of our finest poets, exhibiting his artistry in the style he has made his own. To his lyrics Merwin adds three long narrative poems: "Lament for the Makers" is his tribute to fellow poets who are gone and who had his admiration, from Dylan Thomas to James Merrill; "Testimony" is a tour de force, an autobiographical poem in the manner of Francois Villon; "Suite in the Key of Forgetting" is a remarkable poem about memory and memories. All in all, a masterly work by a major poet.

A literary event -- a new volume of poems by one of the masters of modern poetry -- The Rain in the Trees is W. S. Merwin's first book since the publication five years ago of his Opening the Hand.Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem -- so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently) Opening the Hand, he has produced a body of work of great profundity and power made from the simplest and most beautiful poetic speech.The poems in this new book are concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and are made of the relations with people, with places, past and present, and with history and how the world endures it.Merwin can now rightfully be called a master, and this book shows in every way why this is the case.

This major collection, by a major American poet who has been awarded the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art, is concerned with the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France. "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry." "Merwin has always been a contemplative poet, drawn to the lessons of the natural world and the rigors of unmediated vision. He has also been a romantic poet, heroic in his quest for the depths and intensities, the powers and possibilities of consciousness. Best of all, he has been a surprising poet, continually slipping the bonds of anyone's easy admiration." --J.D.McClatchy, The New Yorker

In The Moon Before Morning, two-time Pulitzer winner W.S. Merwin examines everything from minute flowers to oceanic destruction, weaving our complex relationship with the natural world with his own youth, memory, and intense engagement with the passing of days. With considered reverence, subtle might, and generous poetic imagination, Merwin presents a masterful collection.

This fiftieth anniversary edition revisits a groundbreaking moment in American poetry. The Lice responded, in part, to the atrocities of the Vietnam War and the national unrest of the Civil Rights Movement. Found within these haunting, urgent poems is a citizen artist ensnared in a grand-scale moral crisis. At this key moment in the twentieth century, early in W.S. Merwin's career, he captured a "peculiar, spiritual agony" (Yale Review) that is both of the time and utterly timeless.

Composed as he lost his eyesight, W.S. Merwin's final and exquisite book brims with longing, loss, and unanswerable questions. In Garden Time, Merwin's luminous, ethereal voice gently interrogates mortality; at the very end of his life, he sings lovingly to a tireless world--although not without trepidation. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated his poems to his wife, Paula. The result is a book contemplative and delicate, tender and melancholy. In this gorgeous, mindful, and life-affirming book, our greatest poet channels energy from his memories and deep connection to the world so as to remind us that "The only hope is to be the daylight."

With Lament for the Makers W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet.Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included.Lament for the Makers connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.

America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so.  Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation," writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. Summer Doorways captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, A Mask for Janus the moment was, as the author writes,  an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer."

There’s no mystery to chopping down a tree. But how do you put back together a tree that’s been felled? Mystical instructions are required, and that’s what W. S. Merwin provides in his prose piece ?Unchopping a Tree,” appearing for the first time in a self-contained volume. Written with a poet’s grace, an ecologist’s insights, and a Buddhist’s reverence for life, this elegant work describes the difficult, sacred job of reconstructing a tree. Step by step, page by page, with Merwin’s humble authority, secrets are revealed, and the destroyed tree rises from the forest floor. Unchopping a Tree opens with simplicity and grace: ?Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nest that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places.” W. S. Merwin, like many conservationists, is quick to say: ?When we destroy the so-called natural world around us we’re simply destroying ourselves. And I think it’s irreversible.” Thus the tree takes on a scale that begs the reader’s compassion, and one tree is a parable for the restoration of all nature.

Poet and environmentalist Merwin, W. S.moved to Hawaii in 1976 and has spent the last thirty years planting nineteen acres with more than eight hundred species of palm, creating a lush, sustainable forest on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano on the island of Maui. Now the Merwin Conservancy, this land has served as Merwin's muse and his passion, appearing as a consistent subject of his poems and his germinal essays on conservation. What Is a Garden? collects eight of Merwin's poems and three of his essays emblematic of his palm garden writings from the 1980s to the present and presents them alongside photographer Larry Cameron's spectacular images of Merwin's garden, all taken between 2013 and 2014. These photographs lure readers deep into the vast expanse of Merwin's palm garden and offer unprecedented glimpses into this private exotic landscape as a visual feast for the viewer, rich with insights into the spirit of the place that has most directly inspired Merwin's garden poetry.Cameron first met Merwin in the 1990s while working on a documentary film about Merwin's tropical garden. The friendship that grew between the two artists of different genres continues to this day. What Is a Garden? also includes a new introduction by Merwin chronicling his personal history with his palm garden, Cameron's photographer's note on his friendship with the poet and his inspiration for this collection, and an identification guide to the plants featured in the volume. Poet and environmentalist Merwin, W. S.moved to Hawaii in 1976 and has spent the last thirty years planting nineteen acres with more than eight hundred species of palm, creating a lush, sustainable forest on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano on the island of Maui. Now the Merwin Conservancy, this land has served as Merwin's muse and his passion, appearing as a consistent subject of his poems and his germinal essays on conservation. What Is a Garden? collects eight of Merwin's poems and three of his essays emblematic of his palm garden writings from the 1980s to the present and presents them alongside photographer Larry Cameron's spectacular images of Merwin's garden, all taken between 2013 and 2014. These photographs lure readers deep into the vast expanse of Merwin's palm garden and offer unprecedented glimpses into this private exotic landscape as a visual feast for the viewer, rich with insights into the spirit of the place that has most directly inspired Merwin's garden poetry. Cameron first met Merwin in the 1990s while working on a documentary film about Merwin's tropical garden. The friendship that grew between the two artists of different genres continues to this day. What Is a Garden? also includes a new introduction by Merwin chronicling his personal history with his palm garden, Cameron's photographer's note on his friendship with the poet and his inspiration for this collection, and an identification guide to the plants featured in the volume. One of the United States' most acclaimed contemporary poets, former U.S. poet laureate Merwin, W. S.is the author and translator of more than fifty books. He is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and winner of a National Book Award, a Tanning Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and other honors. His most recent books are The Moon before Morning, The Shadow of Sirius, The Book of Fables, and Present Company. Filmmaker and photographer Larry Cameron is a former staff member of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and the University of South Carolina. His nature photographs have been published in Audubon, Sierra, Outside, and Wilderness, as well as locally in South Carolina Wildlife, Sandlapper, and Riverbanks magazines.One of the United States' most acclaimed contemporary poets, former U.S. poet laureate Merwin, W. S.is the author and translator of more than fifty books. He is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and winner of a National Book Award, a Tanning Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and other honours. His most recent books are The Moon before Morning, The Shadow of Sirius, The Book of Fables, and Present Company. Filmmaker and photographer LARRY CAMERON is a former staff member of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and the University of South Carolina. His nature photographs have been published in Audubon, Sierra.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. The Moon Before Morning is a love letter composed in a stunning rush of memory. Answering the call set forth in The Shadow of Sirius (2009), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize, Merwin extends the emotional and intellectual reach of that collection with passionate reverence for the natural world, bittersweet reflection on time’s irrevocable ravages, and equanimity informed by a lifetime of writing and practised contemplation. Merwin’s studied precision in form and language filters crisp, beautiful images through ethereal memory, forging an intense bond between the writer and a quickly transforming world. ‘When we forget,’ Merwin writes, others will remember: no action or spirit on Earth is without its infinite reverberations. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. Merwin composed the poems of Garden Time as he was losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated the poems to his wife, Paula. In this gorgeous, mindful and life-affirming book, he channels energy from animated sounds and memories to remind us that ‘the only hope is to be the daylight’. This late collection written in his late-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Switching between past and present, he shows us a powerful and moving vision of the eternal, focusing on images of mornings, sunsets, shifting seasons, stars, birds and insects to capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world. In a poem about Li Po, ‘now there is only the river / that was always on its own way’. In another poem he dreams that ‘the same river is still here / the house is the old house and I am here in the morning / in the sunlight and the same bird is singing’. He remembers when ‘dragonflies were as common as sunlight / hovering in their own days’ and recalls ‘a house that had been left to its own silence / for half a century’. In a poem of wonder entitled ‘Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud’, he writes: ‘I keep looking for what has always been mine / searching for it even as I / think of leaving it.’ Poetry Book Society Recommendation

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. While he was long viewed in the States as an essential voice in modern American literature, his poetry was unavailable in Britain for over 35 years until Bloodaxe published this edition of his Selected Poems in 2007. This new selection covers over five decades of his poetry, from The Dancing Bears (1954) to Present Company (2005). Most of the book is drawn from his major American retrospective, Migration, winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry. It was followed in 2009 by The Shadow of Sirius, which won him a second Pulitzer Prize, and then by The Moon Before Morning (2014) and Garden Time (2016). Merwin’s poetry has moved beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of his work: ‘I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.’ His recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. Merwin is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world.

US Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Bloodaxe published his Selected Poems in 2007. At 82, Merwin produced ‘his best book in a decade – and one of the best outright’ (Publishers Weekly), and a collection which has won him his second Pulitzer Prize in the US and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK. The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in his latest collection. ‘I have only what I remember,’ Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound-the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and ‘our long evenings and astonishment’. In ‘Photographer’, Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by ‘someone who understood’. In ‘Empty Lot’, Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and "one of the greatest poets of our age ... the Thoreau of our era" (Edward Hirsch) comes a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event that captures the spiritual anguish of our time. Hailed by Peter Davison in the Boston Sunday Globe as a poet who "engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match," W. S. Merwin now gives us The Pupil. These are poems of great lyrical intensity, concerned with darkness and light, with the seasons, and with the passing of time across landscapes that are both vast and minutely imagined. They capture the bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong-doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poet's youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poet's sense of a larger mystery: ... we know from the beginning that the darkness is beyond us there is no explaining the dark it is only the light that we keep feeling a need to account for --from "The Marfa Lights" Passionate, rigorous, and quietly profound, The Pupil is an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetry--a book that finds W. S. Merwin's singularly resonant voice at the height of its power.