Merrill, James Books

Selected Poems

James Merrill

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Editorial Review:

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. This volume rings together the best of Merrill—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.” Merrill 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.

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?

The Changing Light at Sandover

James Merrill

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world.
The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, and utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry.

Collected Poems

James Merrill

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." 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 spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."

This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.

Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.


From the Hardcover edition.

Another Language of Flowers: Paintings

Dorothea Tanning, James Ingram Merrill

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The Marriage of Painting and Poetry 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

ANOTHER LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS is a monograph of paintings, both finished and in preparatory sketches, each oil on canvas and rather large in size, that are gathered and presented with the titles assigned to each painting by poet friends of the painter. Dorothea Tannning has created twelve elegant and dreamy blossoms and pairs each painting with a poetic response by some of our most gifted poets today - James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery among them. The result is a beautiful little book that speaks quietly to our sense of beauty. Here is a treasure book to not only add to your bedside stand to close the day with sweetness, but here is also that 'book for someone special' that is ever on the list for readers and art lovers alike. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

Imagine walking through a garden full of never-before-seen flowers. Then open this book and you will find twelve of them waiting to charm you, beckon to you, and whisper their messages like perfume in the air. Dorothea Tanning has painted these twelve imaginary blooms on twelve canvases--one for each month, or for each hour of the day or night. To speak for them, twelve contemporary poets have chosen a flower and given it its voice, creating, in these pages, a dazzling collaboration that has resulted in a new "language of flowers."

With Poems by: James Merrill, Harry Mathews, Rosanna Warren, Debora Greger, Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard,J. D. McClatchy, W S.Merwin, John Ashbery, Stephen Yenser, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

Selected Poems, 1946-1985

James Merrill

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A technically brilliant, superb poet and a great collection 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Merrill is known for his technical brilliance, even rescuing lost verse forms from obscurity. He has been accused of arch intellectualism, and many readers detect a certain lack of emotion between the lines, but while these criticisms are likely true, lovers of formalist poetry should take the time to read him, for he is marvellous, witty, and urbane. Fans of Stevens, Moore, Ashbery and Bishop will most likely warm to Merrill.

"Charles on Fire" is a good place to start, but "Lost in Translation", which appears in the collection "Divine Comedies" is my favorite. I have read this poem dozens of times, and will likely never tire of it.

And if you're ready for more, by all means, take on "The Changing Light at Sandover", his magnum opus, an eccentric, occult masterpiece.

The Changing Light at Sandover: Including the Whole of the Book of Ephraim, Mirabell's Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant and a New Coda, the Higher Keys (Changing Light at Sandover CL)

James Merrill

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Voice of the Poet: Merrill

James Merrill

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Poet with a Voice 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Merrill is a wonderful reader of his poetry. I'm sorry there is not more included here. I could listen to another couple of hours. But I'm very glad to have this. The accompanying booklet includes texts in the order of the readings.

Editorial Review:

James Merrill, the son of Merrill Lynch cofounder Charles Lynch, rose from a privileged but unsettled childhood to become one of the leading lyrical poets of the 20th century. Composed of rare, self-read recordings and a booklet containing the text of each poem, The Voice of the Poet: James Merrill celebrates Merrill and his complex grapplings with love and loss. Listeners will immerse themselves in the poet's melodic narration in such classics as "The Days of 1964," "An Urban Convalescence," and "Lost in Translation." "The Broken Home," a reflection on his parents' widely publicized divorce, nails Merrill's love/loss dichotomy perfectly by showing his struggle to reconcile their differences. Listen to Merrill read "The School Play." Visit our audio help page for more information. (Running time: 1 hour, 1 cassette)

Dante's Inferno: Translations by 20 Contemporary Poets

Dante

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From the First Nine Poems, 1946-76

James Merrill

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This or the Selected or the Collected? 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

In 1982, this book was brought out as a companion to THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER, which is definitely what I recommend reading of Merrill if one reads nothing else. Going up to the book DIVINE COMEDIES 1976, this ample collection is far more manageable (and affordable) than the brand new 2001 COLLECTED POEMS. There is also a SELECTED POEMS which encompasses Merrill's poems through 1985. This doesn't mean a whole lot is added over this book, since Merrill was working on SANDOVER through most of the late 70's and early 80's.

What I did, and what I recommend doing, is reading this book and deciding if one wants even more late and early Merrill, which is what the COLLECTED offers. I happen to find early Merrill rather dry and dull, although apparently Harold Bloom loved him. I also happen to find late Merrill a bit too willfully obscure. You can feel him teetering on the edge in SANDOVER. The COLLECTED also offers 25 verse translations and perhaps that will be the tipping point.

The bottom line is, if one wants to get a sense of Merrill outside of SANDOVER, and if one wants to read the poems referred to in SANDOVER, this book allows one to do so. If one wants to own Merrill, lock stock and barrel, then the new COLLECTED POEMS plus the COLLECTED NOVELS plus SANDOVER is needed. Whichever one's preference, one is in for some great reading.

Collected Novels and Plays

James Merrill

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Editorial Review:

Following the widely celebrated Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of James Merrill’s works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form.

Merrill’s first novel, The Seraglio, is a daring roman à clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America’s most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American’s adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill’s plays, including the one-act comedy of manners The Bait and the Chekhovian The Immortal Husband—a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth—are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill’s short play The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic, The Changing Light at Sandover.