Merrill: Poems Poems

by Merrill, James; Hammer, Langdon

• ISBN13: 9781101907856
• ISBN10: 1101907851
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-03-07
• Publisher: Everyman's Library

Summary

A beautiful hardcover selection of poems by one of the giants of contemporary American poetry. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS.

James Merrill 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. Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways--ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler wrote of Merrill, "He has become one of our indispensable poets." This volume brings together an entirely new pocket-sized selection of the best of Merrill's work. His poetry dazzles at every turn, and this balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to the work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars.

Author Biography

JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995) wrote twelve books of poems, as well as the epic poem 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.

LANGDON HAMMER is chair of the English Department at Yale University. His books include James Merrill: Life and Art and Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and he edited the Library of America voluems Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and Selected Letters and May Swenson: Collected Poems. A former Guggenheim fellow, he has written about poetry for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The American Scholar, where he is poetry editor.