Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I'm reading the complete/selected/collected of many late 20th century poets these days and was extremely gratified with the work of James Merrill. I think the most outstanding quality of his work, when compared to that of most of the others, is the fact that he maintains a sense of humor and delight from the first poems published in 1951 to the last, written in 1995. I don't think Merrill is out to impress anyone; to please them, perhaps, but not to dazzle with erudition or intellect. Meanwhile, he's a very clever manipulator of rhyme and meter, and I particularly enjoyed the poems that alternated ballad stanzas with terza rima to keep the narrative from grinding down into the predictable rhythm of either. He's smart, well read, and well traveled and has obvious fun juggling all three in these performances. Nothing seems to have escaped his voracious curiosity, or the generosity with which he shares it with his readers.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Selected Poems
James Merrill himself 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. This volume rings together the best of Merrill—from the domestic rupture of "The Broken Home" to the universal connections of "Lost in Translation"; from the American storyteller of "The Summer People" to the ecologically motivated satirist of "Self-Portrait in a TyvekTM Windbreaker." Merrill 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.LogThen when the flame forked like a sudden pathI gasped and stumbled, and was less.Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,Dear light along the way to nothingness,What could be made of you but light, and this?
0 comments:
Post a Comment