James Merrill: selected poems; a new selection

Merrill, James, edited by J. D. McClatchy & Stephen Yenser

ISBN 10: 037571166X / ISBN 13: 9780375711664

Published by Knopf, New York, 2008

About this Item

xvi, 298p., introduction, notes, short chronology, suggested reading, fine first edition trade paperback in pictorial wraps.

Seller Inventory # 216358

Bibliographic Details

• Title: James Merrill: selected poems; a new selection
• Publisher: Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037571166X
• ISBN 13: 9780375711664
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Seller catalogs:
  • Gay Studies
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

This volume brings together the best of Merrill—and dazzles at every turn. This balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to his work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars.

James Merrill himself once called his body of work “chronicles of love and loss,” and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life—comic and haunting, exotic and domestic—to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. 

Includes poems from the domestic rupture of “The Broken Home” to the universal connections of “Lost in Translation”; from the American storyteller of “The Summer People” to the ecologically motivated satirist of “Self-Portrait in a TyvekTM Windbreaker.”

Log
Then when the flame forked like a sudden path
I gasped and stumbled, and was less.
Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,
Dear light along the way to nothingness,
What could be made of you but light, and this?

About the Author

James Merrill (1926–1995) wrote twelve books of poems, as well as the epic The Changing Light at Sandover. He published two plays, two novels, and a memoir, A Different Person. The recipient of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, Merrill was also a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.