Synopses & Reviews
Hailed by Peter Davison in the
Boston Sunday Globe as a poet who “engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match,” W. S. Merwin now gives us
The Pupil, a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event.
These are poems of great lyrical intensity, concerned with darkness and light, with the seasons, and with the passing of time across landscapes that are both vast and minutely imagined. They capture the spiritual anguish of our time; the bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong- doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poets youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes
from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poets sense of a larger mystery:
. . . we know
from the beginning that the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for
—from “The Marfa Lights”
Passionate, rigorous, and quietly profound, The Pupil is an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetry—a book that finds W. S. Merwins singularly resonant voice at the height of its power.
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Fresh from several much-praised book-length works, the impressively prolific Merwin (The Folding Cliffs, etc.) enters his sixth decade as a publishing poet with a decidedly mixed group of new short poems." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Known for their elegance and, in later periods, lack of punctuation, his poems include many sonnets and are apt to use soft, echoing rhyme. Lovely to hear, they have their own life on the page, where the tension between syntax and enjambment provides narrative thrust." Library Journal
Review
"A pupil is both a student and the aperture in the eye that responds to light and dark, and Merwin, a much-honored and sage poet, explores both meanings in this elegant collection of spare, haunting poems." Booklist
Synopsis
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and "one of the greatest poets of our age ... the Thoreau of our era" (Edward Hirsch) comes a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event that captures the spiritual anguish of our time.
Hailed by Peter Davison in the
Boston Sunday Globe as a poet who "engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match," W. S. Merwin now gives us
The Pupil. These are poems of great lyrical intensity, concerned with darkness and light, with the seasons, and with the passing of time across landscapes that are both vast and minutely imagined. They capture the bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong-doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poet's youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poet's sense of a larger mystery:
... we know
from the beginning that the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for
--from "The Marfa Lights"
Passionate, rigorous, and quietly profound, The Pupil is an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetry--a book that finds W. S. Merwin's singularly resonant voice at the height of its power.
About the Author
W. S. Merwin has been awarded most of the major prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry. He and his wife live on Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.
From the Hardcover edition.