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Zusatztext “Reading Merrill is like reading Marvell or Keats or Dickinson; having his lines in mind is that unique thing! a voice that says somebody was here before.” —Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor James Merrill; Edited by Langdon Hammer Klappentext A beautiful hardcover selection of poems by one of the giants of contemporary American poetry. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS. James Merrill 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. 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 wrote of Merrill, "He has become one of our indispensable poets." This volume brings together an entirely new pocket-sized selection of the best of Merrill's work. His poetry 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. FOREWORD James Merrill is frequently viewed as a mandarin taste, a mid-twentieth-century Mallarme. He was happy to encourage this notion, and plenty of poems in this book support it. But this selection from his work also puts on view a surprisingly accessible poet who wrote short, funny, pointed poems that were topical and political in nature. It shows how gossipy and sociable he could be, how quotable, and, without ever giving up his irony and virtuosity, how full of honest feeling. The fact that Merrill treats his reader as a friend who already knows about his life – the raw material out of which he made his poems – is both charming and problematic. There is a disarming presumption of intimacy in his tone, but it’s easy to feel excluded since we are not after all his friends. Surely he must be speaking not to us but to some other audience of people as quick-witted and worldly as he . . . That impression diminishes, however, once we accept his invitation, get used to reading his poetry, and recognize its recurring characters and locations, themes and motifs. But it speeds up the process to learn a little about his biography. The story begins with his parents: Charles Merrill, co-founder of the mighty brokerage house Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a fashionable New Woman, smart, demanding, and intently focused on her only hild. His parents’ divorce in 1938 badly wounded the twelve-year-old boy. Merrill recalls the event in two of his often anthologized poems, ‘‘The Broken Home’’ and ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ and it features in the background of many more, including the rollicking ballad cum adolescent sexual fantasy ‘‘Days of 1935.’’ But Merrill’s parents turn up in less explicit ways too. Take for instance the hot-head stove and frosty refrigerator in ‘‘The Midnight Snack,’’ or the Sultan and Scheherazade in ‘‘The Thousand and Second Night.’’ (Incidentally, the contrast in kind between those two poems, one compact and comic, the other long, various, and improvisatory, nicely suggests the wide range of his talent.) In fact the presence of Merrill’s parents – or better, the conflicts at the core of his experience that they represent – can always be felt in his penchant for ‘‘seeing double,’’ as he phrases it in ‘‘To a Butterfly.’’ ‘‘Seeing double’’ means in Merrill’s case a capacity to see both sides of almost any conflict. This bifocal vision is related to his pleasure in paradoxes, his delight in turning cliches on their head, and his love of the double entendre. His poetry is indeed so dense with puns, both diabolically-clever and groan-inducing ones, that it’s easy to miss half of them on the fi...
