The Pupil

Merwin, W.S.

ISBN 10: 037541276X / ISBN 13: 9780375412769

Published by Knopf, 2001

About this Item

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 spiritual anguish of our time; 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, echoesfrom the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poet?s sense of a larger mystery. William Stanley Merwin (1927 ? 2019) was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Merwin received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009; the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005, and the Tanning Prize ? one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets ? as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 2010, the Library of Congress named him the 17th United States Poet Laureate.

Seller Inventory # SKU2020025822

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Pupil
• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037541276X
• ISBN 13: 9780375412769
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Like New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Weight: 11 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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, a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event.

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 spiritual anguish of our time; 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.

About the Author

W. S. Merwin has been awarded most of the major prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry. He and his wife live on Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.