Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0420/2004017473.html
Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... LeRoy - Woodward Memorial Library | 0077062 | 811.54 MER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Winner of the National Book Award A New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year"
A powerful case can be made for declaring W.S. Merwin the most influential American poet of the last half-century. Migration: New & Selected Poems is that case.
As an undergraduate at Princeton, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to "get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day." Over the last 50 years, Merwin's muse led him beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engaged a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of W.S. Merwin's work, "I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn't take so much from it into my own life."
The definitive volume from "one of America's greatest living poets."-- The Washington Post Book World
"The poems in Migration speak from a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection."--Citation from the National Book Award judges"
The publication of W. S. Merwin's selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world... Merwin is one of the great poets of our age."-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[I]t's hard to believe this rich selection represents the work of just one man."-- Publishers Weekly
"[In] any landscape, Merwin stands tall."-- Philadelphia Inquirer
"Complex, spiritual, and evocative, Merwin is a major poet, and this is a sublime measure of his achievements."--ALA Booklist
" Migration: New and Selected Poems gathers Merwin's personal harvest of his fifty-year oeuvre into one magisterial volume."-- The Wichita Eagle
"Many of us have followed W.S. Merwin's work book by book, collection by collection....He has created a body of wisdom literature that is unprecedented in our age. I feel lucky to be alive at a time when W.S. Merwin has been creating his startling and incomparable work."--Edward Hirsch, introduction to "A Tribute to W.S. Merwin"
"The trajectory of Merwin's work is meteoric: its greatest flashes of beauty and insight are the product of traditional poetic impulses breaking up under the pressures of our atmosphere... he has written some of the most powerful poems in the language against our species' murderous sense of self-importance."-- Jacket
"W. S. Merwin's legacy is unquestionably secure: his best and most fierce poems are moody, visionary compositions that dive into the unconscious and the seeds of existence with an inwardness and scrutiny unique in American poetry."-- Poetry
From Once in Spring
A sentence continues after thirty years
it wakes in the silence of the same room
the words that come to it after the long comma
existed all that time wandering in space
as points of light travel unseen through ages
of which they alone are the measure and arrive
at last to tell of something that came to pass
before they ever began or meant anything
Poet and translator W.S. Merwin has received nearly every major literary accolade, including the Pulitzer Prize, Tanning Prize and Bollingen Prize. He has long been committed to artistic, political and environmental causes in both word and deed; when presented with the Pulitzer Prize, he donated the prize money to artists and the draft resistance. He currently lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palm trees.
Author Notes
W. S. Merwin was born William Stanley Merwin in New York City on September 30, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1948 and did some graduate work there in Romance languages. He worked as a tutor and translator while writing poetry. In 1952, his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He wrote numerous collections of poetry including Green with Beasts, The Moving Target, The Lice, The Compass Flower, The Rain in the Trees, The River Sound, The Moon Before Morning, and Garden Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders and in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, the National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Vixen.
He also published essays, short fiction, memoirs, and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, and Osip Mandelstam. Merwin's other works included Unframed Originals, The Lost Upland, The Ends of the Earth, and Summer Doorways. He also received the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Tanning Prize and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He died on March 15, 2019 at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mystical formalist, elegant romantic, Vietnam-era protester, translator, maker of sweet memoirs and uneasy dreamscapes, and ecological activist, Merwin has been so prominent for so long that it's hard to believe this rich selection represents the work of just one man. The earliest Merwin-a melancholy 1950s craftsman-gets the first 70 pages, including the bejeweled verse fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Sun." The haunting free verse of the next two decades includes the sad, urgent protest poems of The Lice (1967) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Carrier of Ladders (1970). Merwin's attraction to instinct and mystery drew his poems toward totemic, resonant images, in lines which imitated chants and prayers. The Rain in the Trees (1988) concerned the forests and coasts of Hawaii, where the poet still lives. His longer, more recent works offer personal memories; "Testimony" (from 1999's The River Sound) takes 56 pages to run through the poet's whole life. Even there-and in the few, lyrical, controlled new poems at the very end of the volume-Merwin retains a sense of terse whispering, and a graceful attraction to silence; his verse comes, if anyone's does, from "the eye of the mind where we know/ from the beginning that the darkness/ is beyond us." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Migration 0 is an apt title for this generous collection, given that Merwin has migrated far from his boyhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he studied with R. P. Blackmur and John Berryman at Princeton, and W. H. Auden chose his first book, A Mask for Janus0 , as the 1952 Yale Series of Younger Poets winner. But rather than dwell within the precincts of the American academy, Merwin left for Europe, became an adept and prolific translator, and eventually settled in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palm trees and works to restore and preserve the wild, endeavors that deepen his already profound rapport with nature, the soul of his work. Merwin has migrated within the universe of poetry, too, moving from solidly constructed, tactile, and dramatic works to airy, abstract, unpunctuated, and contemplative poems, a journey beautifully mapped here in selections from 15 previous collections, capped by a gathering of new poems. Complex, spiritual, and evocative, Merwin is a major poet, and this is a sublime measure of his achievements. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Nearly twice the size of Merwin's Selected Poems (1988), this career-spanning compendium includes selections from 1952's A Mask for Janus through 2001's The Pupil, along with eight new lyrical odes. Advised by Ezra Pound to seek out poetry at its sources, Merwin has always found inspiration in the elemental: nature, myth, and the poets of classical antiquity. While his early books were written in the formal, academic mode of the time, in the 1960s and 1970s he perfected a reticent yet evocative figurative style that influenced many young poets. In the decades since, his poems have again become longer, his lines more expansive and syntactically relaxed while retaining the tonal authority and intellectual complexity for which he'd always been known. Merwin's poetry has resisted literary fads and gratuitous experimentation, and while some may find it aloof and emotionally constrained, this volume shows him to be an artist who has never ceased to challenge himself and his readership. For most poetry collections.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.