W. S. Merwin

"In this new work from one of America's foremost poets, W.S. Merwin guides readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Similar in tone and effect to Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes, every poem in Present Company directly address the human encounters and ordinary objects of daily life, as in "To the Face in the Mirror" or "To Salt."" "These poems to the world are fully engaged with living, are serious yet playful, inspiriting and full of wonder. Merwin recasts the particulars of the personal, and makes them profoundly universal. Whether writing of an imaginary vehicle in "To Zbigniew Herbert's Bicycle" or watching fireworks from a distance in "To the Coming Winter," his poems create a rare and compelling intimacy."--Jacket.

A collection of poems translated from various Asian languages. In For Ko Who Has Come Back from China, the 13th century Zen monk, Muso Soseki, wrote: "Don't say that / your wisdom and my ignorance / belong to opposing worlds / Look: China and Japan / but there are not / two skies."

From a major American poet - a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii. The story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers.

A collection of stories pays tribute to the ancient land of the Lascaux caves in southwestern France, where aristocrats, shepherds, wine merchants, and innkeepers lead anachronistic lives.

The poems in this new book are concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and are made of the relations with people, with places, past and present, and with history and how the world endures it.