Bøger af W. S. Merwin

The Mays Of Ventadorn is a love song written to the winding path of history and the beauty of language.

Originally published: 1st Owl book ed. New York: H. Holt, 1994.

A strikingly beautiful book of poems from one of our finest poets, exhibiting his artistry in the style he has made his own. To his lyrics Merwin adds three long narrative poems: "Lament for the Makers" is his tribute to fellow poets who are gone and who had his admiration, from Dylan Thomas to James Merrill; "Testimony" is a tour de force, an autobiographical poem in the manner of Francois Villon; "Suite in the Key of Forgetting" is a remarkable poem about memory and memories. All in all, a masterly work by a major poet.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century - an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. This late collection written in his late-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory.

America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. "Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation," writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. "Summer Doorways" captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, "A Mask for Janus"--the moment was, as the author writes, "an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer."

With "Lament for the Makers" W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet. Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included. "Lament for the Makers" connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century. At 82, Merwin produced 'his best book in a decade - and one of the best outright' (Publishers Weekly), and a collection which has won him his second Pulitzer Prize in the US and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century. While he was long viewed in the States as an essential voice in modern American literature, his poetry was unavailable in Britain for over 35 years until Bloodaxe published this edition of his Selected Poems in 2007.