Selected Poems

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. While he has long been viewed in the States as an essential voice in modern American literature, his poetry has been unavailable in Britain for over 35 years. This 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. 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.

W.S. Merwin has been awarded most of the principal prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize and the Tanning Prize, and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. As well as being an internationally renowned poet, he is the author of many classic translations, including editions of Neruda, Dante, The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, and (from Bloodaxe) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Born in New Jersey City in 1927, he taught at several universities, and now lives on the Pacific island of Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.