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W. S. Merwin: Collected Poems 1996–2011

Edited by J. D. McClatchy

“Has there ever been a poet who has written in so many voices? The good, relentless student quality which has made Merwin such a great translator, and brought him early success, when applied to language over a lifetime gives us the sound of a poet who is perpetually preparing to meet his inspiration on its own terms, as if it is something he is merely guiding, not creating.”—John Freeman, Virginia Quarterly Review

Overview

Overview

News Remembering “the Proteus of American poets,” W. S. Merwin, 1927–2019
March 27, 2019

Interviews J. D. McClatchy on W. S. Merwin: “A new sound for American poems”
March 15, 2019

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“In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time’s passing,” writes the critic Helen Vendler, W. S. Merwin “has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style.” This second and final volume of the Library of America’s edition of Merwin’s collected poems begins in the mid-1990s, with the publication of two of his most ambitious books: The Vixen (1996) and The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative (1998). These projects have deep formal and thematic affinities: each is composed of long lines evocative of Greek and Latin elegies, and each is a sustained meditation on the history and spirit of a place that Merwin has come to know intimately.

Many of the poems in The Vixen are set in the Quercy region of southwestern France, where Merwin has lived intermittently since buying a farmhouse there in 1954; personal recollections of the house, his neighbors, and the rural landscape are joined by poems about historical figures, such as the poets Peire Vidal and François de Maynard. Merwin’s long residence in Hawaii led him to research and write The Folding Cliffs, a sweeping narrative of Hawaii’s past whose story centers on a nineteenth-century family resisting forced removal to a leprosy colony. For this edition Merwin has contributed a new prefatory note, “How I Came to Write The Folding Cliffs,” and the poem’s many allusions to Hawaiian history and culture are fully annotated for the first time.

The four collections published after The Folding Cliffs—The River Sound (1999), The Pupil (2001), Present Company (2005), and The Shadow of Sirius (2008)—foreground Merwin’s characteristic sensitivity and responsiveness to the natural world, his spiritual insights, and his facility with unadorned, elemental language. Many of his later poems are expansively retrospective, such as the long autobiographical poem “Testimony,” inspired by François Villon’s Le Grand Testament, and “Lament for the Makers,” an extended act of homage to Merwin’s poetic influences and friendships.

Collected Poems 1996–2011 concludes with a selection of previously uncollected poems chosen by editor J. D. McClatchy in consultation with the author, including “Tide Line Garden,” dedicated to Stanley Kunitz, and the haiku-like “By the Front Door”: “Rain through the morning / and in the long pool an old toad singing / happiness old as water”.

See the contents for this volume (PDF)

J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018) was the author of many books of poetry and essays, including Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (2014), and the editor of nine Library of America publications. He wrote the libretto for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of Our Town, taught at Yale University, and served as editor of The Yale Review.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian Of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-209-8 679 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 241 Library of America Series

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W. S. Merwin: Collected Poems 1996–2011

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