James Ingram Merrill

In this, his first new book of poems in seven years, Merrill is at the top of his form. His unrivalled poetic use of the private life is brilliantly evident. The stuff of autobiography is transfigured becoming a medium for the profoundest truth, couched in a language that draws on both rueful wit and elegant slang. From "Nine Lives," an Athenian fable, through "Volcanic Holiday," with its euphoric helicopter ride, to "Family Week at Oracle Ranch," set in a New Age rehab center, his vivid glimpses of the real world widen into surprising and meditative visions that touch us all.

Autobiography by poet James Merrill.

"This new Selected Poems replaces an earlier selection of work by James Merrill entitled From the First Nine (1982), now out of print; it includes 121 poems taken from that work and from Late Settings (1985), but it excludes the long narrative poem The Changing Light at Sandover, which is republished simultaneously in a separate volume. Together the two give solid definition to a body of poetic work that must be accounted among the finest in English of our time." "Of James Merrill, the critic Harold Bloom has said, "He is indisputably a verse artist comparable to Milton, Tennyson and Pope. Surely he will be remembered as the Mozart of American poetry, classical rather than mannerist or baroque, master of the changing light or perfection that consoles.""--BOOK JACKET.

"Following James Merrill's widely celebrated Collected Poems and Collected Novels and Plays, this volume gives us the man himself and his straightforward exploration of how he became himself. As much as any poet of our time, Merrill conceived of his work and his life as warp and woof, and the prose collected here (from his juvenilia and occasional pieces through his critical writings to his interviews and memoir) shows how bound up in his craft (itself a recurrent topic) were his readings and reflections, his travels and friendships. Even Merrill's most devoted readers will be startled anew at the range of his aesthetic concerns and the depth of his knowledge. Dante and Ponge, Cavafy and Montale, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, all figure prominently here, and the volume is shot through with commentary on music, especially opera, and descriptions of the world's great cities - including New York, Paris, Istanbul, and Kyoto - and their cultural treasures. The volume closes resoundingly with A Different Person, Merrill's memoir of his young life, in which he travels to Europe to explore the culture, comes of age as a gay man, and faces down his legacy as the son of the renowned financier Charles E. Merrill."--Jacket.

Two long poems: "The thousand and second night", and "From the cupola" plus sixteen others.

"Best known as a poet, James Merrill is also an accomplished novelist, and in The (Diblos) Notebook artfully lays bare the process of writing a novel. A young American writer keeps a notebook that records at one and the same time a series of events on the Greek island of Diblos in which he is deeply involved, and his attempts to transform these events into a novel. Everything that might be found in such a notebook is used here with great cunning: the false starts that end in the middle of a thought; the endless revisions, canceled out in the search for the right word or phrase; the many approaches and backtrackings as the writer seeks an entrance to the materials through several possible doors; the musings on how the material is to be treated; and the wrestlings with the problem of appearance and assumed reality. The author has written an afterword for this new edition of his 1965 novel."--BOOK JACKET.

Poems, by the American author-playwright.

Avant-garde poems implying more than they expressly state.