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Selected Poems of James Merrill
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?
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?
- GenresPoetry
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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73 people want to read
About the author
James Merrill
119 books66 followersJames Ingram Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 12, 2016
Merrill's poetry gets five stars in my book, but I only gave three to this particular collection because his magnum opus, The Changing Light at Sandover, is seriously underrepresented. If one were to go by this book only, one would hardly know it even existed.
February 21, 2016
3/4 stars pre-Divine Comedies, 5 stars from Divine Comedies onwards.
In the first half of his career, Merrill's talent was uneven. His formal abilities were immense, but his ideas sometimes floundered and sometimes flew. With Divine Comedies, he struck upon a rich plethora of fantastic and real sources that enabled him to dwell on the innate complexity of our imaginative life. From there on, he consistently wrote with splendour, multifariousness, exotic yet real situations and above all, a disarming lightness of wit.
He was a man of divisions and paradoxes - born as an insider to wealthy America, his homosexuality cast him equally as an outsider; his politics until the mid-80s were distinctly elitist, but few poets have shown such a passionate awareness of the lives around him or described his familiars with so much force; a celebrant of the living force in people even and especially after their de facto death; an internationalist who dreamed of the unified home (his own parents' separation causing him imaginative fragmentation). He increasingly grasped how to express these paradoxes in symbol, across line break and through metaphors derived from the world of fiction (whether fairytales, The Arabian Nights, The Wizard of Oz), work or specific cultures he'd visited but realised in his own world. Throughout there's humour - an ironic knowing awareness that his dreams of particular people's afterlives are probably fantasies produced by his own desire for a different meaning to life than the procreative one, and to the one where memory can only recede endlessly.
And he was funny. He was a riot of laughter. Dogs, verticality, colour, declinism, ageism, time's jokes on the living - all induced witty retorts that seem endlessly fresh on the page.
In the first half of his career, Merrill's talent was uneven. His formal abilities were immense, but his ideas sometimes floundered and sometimes flew. With Divine Comedies, he struck upon a rich plethora of fantastic and real sources that enabled him to dwell on the innate complexity of our imaginative life. From there on, he consistently wrote with splendour, multifariousness, exotic yet real situations and above all, a disarming lightness of wit.
He was a man of divisions and paradoxes - born as an insider to wealthy America, his homosexuality cast him equally as an outsider; his politics until the mid-80s were distinctly elitist, but few poets have shown such a passionate awareness of the lives around him or described his familiars with so much force; a celebrant of the living force in people even and especially after their de facto death; an internationalist who dreamed of the unified home (his own parents' separation causing him imaginative fragmentation). He increasingly grasped how to express these paradoxes in symbol, across line break and through metaphors derived from the world of fiction (whether fairytales, The Arabian Nights, The Wizard of Oz), work or specific cultures he'd visited but realised in his own world. Throughout there's humour - an ironic knowing awareness that his dreams of particular people's afterlives are probably fantasies produced by his own desire for a different meaning to life than the procreative one, and to the one where memory can only recede endlessly.
And he was funny. He was a riot of laughter. Dogs, verticality, colour, declinism, ageism, time's jokes on the living - all induced witty retorts that seem endlessly fresh on the page.
April 18, 2013
I have a litany of complaints, but I'll attempt brevity.
Let's see: Well, James deploys "lyre" in a poem somberly. That particular poem was released in 1959, the same year Castro arrived in Havana.
Good god.
Elsewhere, he writes of the four great elements with the subtlety of a pornographer directing a pizza delivery. We are given our great floods, our fires, our women that are "wide open, and sunny." A boring concupiscence for the "wild" and "human" (each tamed here completely in form); Whitman/Muir but less brave, and somehow, more archaic.
Sometimes he tries something different; that is interesting.
I want to give this two stars, but most people seem to like him, and I guess he was fairly handsome.
"Indeed, nothing I do is at all fine /
Save certain abstract forms. These come unbidden:"
Let's see: Well, James deploys "lyre" in a poem somberly. That particular poem was released in 1959, the same year Castro arrived in Havana.
Good god.
Elsewhere, he writes of the four great elements with the subtlety of a pornographer directing a pizza delivery. We are given our great floods, our fires, our women that are "wide open, and sunny." A boring concupiscence for the "wild" and "human" (each tamed here completely in form); Whitman/Muir but less brave, and somehow, more archaic.
Sometimes he tries something different; that is interesting.
I want to give this two stars, but most people seem to like him, and I guess he was fairly handsome.
"Indeed, nothing I do is at all fine /
Save certain abstract forms. These come unbidden:"
March 7, 2016
Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Merrill, who died in the 1990s, was a dazzling formalist and one of the great American lyric poets and elegists. His glittering rhymes are a constant source of delight and surprise, and his memoiristic meditations, “chronicles of love and loss,” are at times so witty that he seems to be the love child of Robert Lowell and Stephen Sondheim. Like Lowell, Merrill’s best poems are autobiographical, but he is too full with the love of world play to take himself over-seriously…even at their most painful, Merrill’s poems are always rescued from the maudlin by his keen sense of ironic detachment. Is this a particularly gay sensibility? Sometimes, Merrill can be so baroque as to be indecipherable, but his strongest verses are among the most moving poems I’ve ever read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews