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Beloved poet and essayist Christopher Merrill's personal tale of life and tree limb
About the author
Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Boat, Brilliant Water, and Watch Fire; many edited volumes and translations; and four books of nonfiction, including Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and he has been the book critic for the daily radio news program The World. He directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Summary
Beloved poet and essayist Christopher Merrill's personal tale of life and tree limb
Additional text
"A memoir for lovers of writing and reading." — Kirkus Reviews
“His memoir, written as he was nearing his sixtieth year, traces the delicate, interactive web of creation that links humans and nature, illuminating how vital each small being, each plant, each person is to the whole. In travels across the globe, even to war zones where scenes of the depth of man’s depravity were seared into his soul, Merrill also found the wonder of humanity’s ability to love, to heal, and to connect; the dogwood serves both as a metaphor for this and, in its decline, as an “an augur of our fate” should we fail to honor these connections.”— Foreword Reviews
“An arboreal memoir, an autobiographical dendrology: Merrill, like the dogwood seeds and seedlings, roams the planet, appearing or pausing at unexpected moments in history. The migrant trees sink their roots in various foreign soils; the man, though wandering—even in zones of war—remains rooted in the humus of poetry.” — Eliot Weinberger
“Christopher Merrill is a national treasure, both as a writer and a global warrior for literature and witness. In a fine career of making exquisite books, Self-Portrait with Dogwood might be his most moving. Beauty rises from every page. Going on my short list of favorite books—I will refer to it and teach it for the rest of my life, like I do with Bashō and Hanshan. A quiet classic.” — Luis Alberto Urrea
“How wise of the U.S. State Department to send Christopher Merrill around the globe as a poet-ambassador. I can’t imagine anyone better equipped to represent us to a suffering and turbulent world. His attentive ear and eye, his keen mind, his compassionate heart, his courage and eloquence are all richly displayed in this engrossing book. The stories he tells here—about woods and waters, poetry and soccer, about literary heroes, an ailing daughter, and a dying friend—are suffused by Merrill’s devotion to mercy and beauty, and by his fascination with the ineffable power we call nature.” — Scott Russell Sanders, author of Divine Animal
“Christopher Merrill speaks to the essential and too often buried part of us that intuits the relatedness of all things (human beings and nature, love and war, shame and desire) and investigates the way those intersections urge some of us toward metaphor, toward a life dedicated to the making of art. Self-Portrait with Dogwood makes a case for a new type of memoir in which the self—rather than being spotlighted—is but one slender thread in an intricate weave that reaches across species, centuries, and time zones. This is an elegant, intelligent, deeply compelling, and necessary book.” — Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
“How do we attach meaning to human existence? Merrill’s memoir turns to the dogwood tree as talisman, a presence from his childhood through a life richly textured with natural, literary, and cultural history. His artful reflections on friendship, family, poetry, transplanting trees, and global diplomacy show how ‘giving voice to nonhuman perspectives’ may indeed be essential to cultivating our humanity.” — Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit
Winner of Independent Publisher Book Award - Silver for MemoirDesignated as Finalist for Foreword Indies Awards - MemoirWinner of 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Awards - MemoirWinner of 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award - First Runner Up Memoir
