W.S. Merwin is 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. This new 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.
“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 pieces — 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, itself fabled, Saturday Review once remarked, the prose pieces have “astonishing range and power.”The Book of Fables comprises all the short prose from two of Merwin's 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 sere and sensuous.
Voices is a collection of poetic aphorisms written over several decades by Antonio Porchia and translated by W.S. Merwin. Spontaneous, succinct, and wise, these aphorisms have the spiritual character of the world's great religions-especially Buddhist and Taoist epigrams-and the subtle attention to language of our best literature. Voices is Porchia's only book, which he augmented and revised throughout his life. By the time of his death, it had become a classic, published in over a dozen different Spanish-language editions; today there are also translations into German, French, and Italian. This new bilingual edition, revised and updated with an introduction by Merwin, brings back into print one of Latin America's great literary enigmas.
Growing up in a repressed Presbyterian household, W. S. Merwin reflects on his youth in small river towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The memoir intricately portrays a family lacking language and history, illustrating the formation of a writer's conscience. It serves as both a personal narrative and a cautionary tale about the middle class's desire to erase their origins. Through vivid and intimate family portraits, Merwin offers readers a profound exploration of identity and the impact of familial isolation.
A collection centered in myth, A Mask for Janus is the 49th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets
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.”
Latest collection by one of America's leading poets finds him, now in his mid-80s, reflecting on time and memory. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half- century. 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.
Brings back into print all the poems from The Compass Flower (1977), Feathers from the Hill (1981), and Opening the Hand (1983).
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch) comes a masterly work of poems, exhibiting the artistry and style he made his own.A strikingly beautiful book of poems from one of our finest poets. To his lyrics Merwin adds three long narrative "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.