William Stanley Merwin

Presents a collection of poems reflecting the author's life.

The Shadow of Sirius

Reintroduces the out-of-print works of one of this century's greatest American poets.

The First Four Books of Poems

Spain has produced two books that changed the course of world literature: Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes.

His Fortunes and Adversities

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

Poems deal with spring, trees, city life, the past, dreams, farms, childhood, rain, travel, insects, superstition, and language

Poems

The Rain in the Trees

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca, and has translated from French, Spanish, Latin and Portugese. He has published more than a dozen volumes of orignal poetry and several volumes of prose. Mr. Merwin has been awarded the Tanning Prize, the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Pen Translation Prize, and many other honors. He lives in Haiku, Hawaii. W.S. Merwin's Second Four Books of Poems includes some of the most startlingly original and influential poetry of the second half of this century, a poetry that has moved, as Richard Howard has written, from preterition to presence to prophecy. Other books by M.S. Merwin available from Consortium: East Window (Copper Canyon Press), 1-55659-091-1 The First Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon Press), 1-55659-139-X Flower & Hand (Copper Canyon Press), 1-55659-119-5

The Second Four Books of Poems

Sōiku Shigematsu

Musō Soseki

Poems by the fourteenth century Zen Master deal with nature, wandering, wealth and poverty, solitude, friendship, and mortality

Poems and Sermons

Sun at Midnight

A collection of poetry from the former Poet Laureate offers insight into his observations about human consciousness and spirituality.

Collected Poems 1996-2011

Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort

Selected Writings of Chamfort

Products of the Perfected Civilization

A Mask for Janus, Etc. [Poems.].

A collection from the Bolligen Prize-winning poet drawn from work spanning three decades, this work presents some of the best of a major American poet in one volume

Selected Poems

Fiftieth Anniversary edition of a revolutionary book that still stuns with its prophetic, political, and stylistic force

The Lice

This definitive volume by one of America's greatest poets is essential for all poetry collections.

New & Selected Poems

Migration

A collection of essays by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet traces the origins of the twelfth-century Provental troubadors, from the work of Bernart de Ventadorn, to the ruins of the chGteau of Ventador, to the careworn farmhouse belonging to the author himself.

The Mays of Ventadorn

Presents a collection of the author's best poems along with new works.

Robert ParkeHarrison

Robert ParkeHarrison creates constructed photographs which tell stories of loss, struggle, and personal exploration within landscapes scarred by technology and over-use. He attempts to metaphorically and poetically link his laborious actions, idiosyncratic rituals and strangely crude machines into tales about our modern experience. The mythic world he creates mirrors our world, where nature is domesticated and controlled. The scenes display futile attempts to save or rejuvenate nature. His 'everyman' character patches holes in the sky, creates rain machines, chases storms to create electricity, communicates with the earth to learn its needs. Within these scenes, he creates less refined, less scientific, more ritualistic and poetic possibilities to work with nature rather than destroying it. The nature of his images and the process of their construction are interdisciplinary, embodying aspects of theater, sculpture, and painting, photography and performance. None of the images are real in the factual sense, but they are treated as precious talismans of a lost moment, a documented super-reality, whose message, like that of a myth, transcends the small realities of the day to day world.

The Architect's Brother

Merwin is a major figure in our poetry, one of the few. His first book of verse in five years is an event. It is a very full selection with many sides: brief lyrics and long narratives, all of them marked by a moving and profound sense of the natural world and the presence in it of living creatures. Merwin's language is entirely his own, and his control of it and of the construction of his poems makes for breathtaking work of enduring quality. The narratives are a departure for this poet, dealing as they do with historical figures: "Rimbaud's Piano" is an extended meditation on the poet; others deal with naturalists such as William Bartram, Georg Eberhard Rumpf ("The Blind Seer of Ambon"), and David Douglas; and in "The Real World of Manuel Cordova" he tells a story almost as enthralling as Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Travels

A literary event -- a new volume of poems by one of the masters of modern poetry -- The Rain in the Trees is W. S. Merwin's first book since the publication five years ago of his Opening the Hand. Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem -- so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently) Opening the Hand, he has produced a body of work of great profundity and power made from the simplest and most beautiful poetic speech. The poems in this new book are concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and are made of the relations with people, with places, past and present, and with history and how the world endures it. Merwin can now rightfully be called a master, and this book shows in every way why this is the case.

William Stanley Merwin

Books

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