About the Author:
JAMES MERRILL was born on March 3, 1926, in New York City and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover(1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook(1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
From Publishers Weekly:
Merrill, Pulitzer Prize recipient and two-time American Book Award winner, offers here an enormously far-reaching reading experience. Although the title suggests a preoccupation with the poet's internal life, his poetry moves sweepingly outward: he locates his works in Florida, the Caribbean, Rome and Japan. The genres here are as varied as his geographical settings. In the section "Prose of Departure," he writes primarily in a prose sparingly but pungently laced with verse. A one-act play, "The Image Maker," is a sharply focused parable about a puppet-maker whose creations come alive, representing, perhaps, the poet, for whom image-making is particularly relevant. Many poems are similarly self-referential. In "Morning Glory," for example, he writes, "The world at last our own to reinvent, / This or that bit gets titled 'Morning Glory.' " But the masterly wordsmith more than compensates for occasional self-conscious or whimsical excursions. With his ability to push words to their fullest potential, Merrill blends the magical and the mundane with striking power: "Violet, the sinister of blue . . . / Frost killed the vine . . . I also felt the stab / Our local color lab / Came up with images . . . . "
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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