W. S. Merwin

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.

William Stanley Merwin (1927-2019) oli amerikkalainen runoilija sekä buddhalainen ekofilosofi ja ekoaktivisti. Merwin julkaisi 26 runoteosta, ja hänet palkittiin kahdesti runouden Pulitzer-palkinnolla.Kirjailijan pitää kirjoittaa, mutta se ei yksin riitä. William Stanley Merwin oli sitä mieltä, että pitää myös tehdä jotakin konkreettista luonnon monimuotoisuuden hyväksi. Kun Mervin vuonna 1977 asettui asumaan Mauin saarelle Hawaijille, hän perusti palmutarhan hylätylle ananasplantaasille. Yli neljä vuosikymmentä hän kirjoitti aamut ja hoiti puutarhaansa iltapäivät. Hän ehti istuttaa yli kolmetuhatta puuta, jotka edustavat yli neljääsataa eri palmulajia.Merwinin tuotanto on laaja ja monipuolinen. Sen kaaressa näkyy kehittyminen teknisesti taitavasta nuoresta runoilijasta kantaaottavaksi luonnonsuojelijaksi ja sodanvastustajaksi, joka käyttää runokieltä varsin vapaasti omiin tarkoituksiinsa. Runoissa Merwin tuntuu olevan kotonaan yhtä lailla inhimillisten kysymysten kuin luonnon ilmiöiden äärellä. Kirkkaimpana nousee kuitenkin näkyviin hänen näkemyksellisyytensä. Vaikka runous ei ehkä pelasta maailmaa, näyttää Merwin omalla esimerkillään, että yhdessä käytännön toiminnan kanssa runous tuo toivoa ja voi myös muuttaa maailmaa.Merwin käytti suuren osan elämästään asioiden yksinkertaistamiseen mutta hän ei koskaan kiellä asioiden moniulotteisuutta, kontekstuaalisuutta tai intersubjektiivisuutta. Myöhempien vuosien kokoelmia sävyttävät buddhalaissävytteinen viisaus, näkemisen teemat, luonnon ja ihmisten samanarvoisuuden korostaminen sekä vanhuuteen totuttautuminen.Siriuksen varjo ja muita runoja sisältää runoja W.S. Merwinin seitsemästätoista eri kokoelmasta. Runot on suomentanut runoilija Kimmo Räntilä, joka on aiemmin suomentanut Robert Lowellia.

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."

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Mysteries of light, darkness, temporality, and eternity interweave throughout W.S. Merwin's celebrated collection of poems, The Shadow of Sirius. "I have only what I remember," Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound--Pennsylvania miners and neighborhood streetcars, a conversation with a boyhood teacher or deceased parent, the distinct qualities of autumnal light and gentle rain, well-cultivated loves, and "our long evenings and astonishment." From the universe's contradictions, Merwin once again calls upon the unexpected to illuminate existence.

Named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times.Winner of the National Book Award for PoetryNamed by O as one of the "20 Books of Poetry Everyone Should Own""The poems in Migration speak a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection."--National Book Award judges' statement"The publication of W. S. Merwin's selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world."--Los Angeles TimesW. S. Merwin is the most influential American poet of the last half-century--an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Migration: New and Selected Poems is that case. This 540-page distillation--selected by Merwin from fifteen diverse volumes--is a gathering of the best poems from a profound body of work, accented by a selection of distinctive new poems.As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to "get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day." Migration represents the bounty of those prayers. Over the last fifty years, Merwin's muse has led him beyond the formal verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of Merwin's work: "I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn't take so much from it into my own life." W. S. Merwin is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translation. He lives in Hawaii, where he raises endangered palm trees.

"Metaphors, puns, surrealist visions, converted into sharp, disturbing little narratives . . . only a poet, and a good one, could have written it."--The Atlantic MonthlyW.S. Merwin's acclaimed short prose--many of which first appeared in The New Yorker--blur the distinction between fiction, poetry, essay, and memoir. Reminiscent of Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, they evoke mythical patterns and unlikely adventures and raise questions about art, reality, and meaning. As the Saturday Review remarked, they have "astonishing range and power." The Book of Fables is an affordable paperback of all the short prose from two out-of-print collections, The Miner's Pale Children and Houses and Travellers. The pieces run from a single sentence to a dozen pages and create a poetic landscape both severe and sensuous. From "A Garden" You are a garden into which a bomb once fell and did not explode, during a war that happened before you can remember. It came down at night. It screamed, but there were so many screams. It was heard, but it was forgotten. It buried itself. It was searched for but it was given up. So much else had been buried alive . . . Poet and translator W.S. Merwin has long been committed to artistic, political, and environmental causes in both word and deed. He has received nearly every major literary accolade, including the 2005 National Book Award in Poetry for Migration. Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palms.

"One of America's greatest living poets."--The Washington Post Book World"Merwin keeps his language simple but his perceptions complex. Classical in their lines of inquiry and restraint yet vital in their attunement to the here and now, these personal odes and musings on daily existence and the cycles of life are, by turns, bemused and exalted . . . each poem infuses the collection with buoyancy and light."--BooklistNow in paperback, W.S. Merwin's latest masterwork--which reviewers have described as "meditative," "playful," and "lithely beautiful"--guides readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Akin to Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes, every poem in Present Company directly addresses the people and things of daily life, as in "To the Thief at the Airport" or "To Lingering Regrets." "To This May" They know so much more now about the heart we are told but the world still seems to come one at a time one day one year one season and here it is spring once more with its birds nesting in the holes in the walls its morning finding the first time its light pretending not to move always beginning as it goes

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.

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."

Spain has produced two books that changed world literature: Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes, the first picaresque novel ever written and the inspired precursor to works as various as Vanity Fair and Huckleberry Finn. Banned by the Spanish Inquisition after publication in 1554, Lazarillo was soon translated throughout Europe, where it was widely copied. The book is a favorite to this day for its vigorous colloquial style and the earthy realism with which it exposes human hypocrisy. The bastard son of a prostitute, Lazarillo goes to work for a blind beggar, who beats and starves him, while teaching him some very useful dirty tricks. The boy then drifts in and out of the service of a succession of masters, each vividly sketched and together revealing the corrupt world of imperial Spain. Its miseries are made all the more apparent by the candor and surprising good cheer with which young Lazarillo recounts his ever more curious fate. This version of Lazarillo, by the prizewinning poet and translator W.S. Merwin, brings out the wonderful vitality and humor of this universal masterwork. The author of Lazarillo de Tormes is unknown.