Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology - Hardcover

Merwin, W. S.

3.48

31 ratings by Goodreads

9781887178518: Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1887178511 ISBN 13: 9781887178518

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1996

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With Lament for the Makers W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet.
Lament for the Makers connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.

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From Publishers Weekly:

"Our plesance here is all vain-glory/ This false warld is bot transitory," wrote William Dunbar in his 16th-century poem, "Lament for the Makaris." The piece was not only a meditation on death but a memorial to a slew of influential writers (Chaucer, and the like) who had passed on. Now, borrowing title, theme and rhyme scheme, Merwin, at age 69, does likewise: "The notes in some anthology/ listed persons born after me." So he turns to embrace a star-studded corpus. Twenty-three of his mentors, from Frost to Plath to Roethke to Merrill, are fondly, if briefly, remembered in this 208-line dirge ("then word of the death of Stevens/ brought a new knowledge of silence"). And, in a stroke of clever marketing, a single poem from each of the departed, complete with photo and mini-obit, rounds out what is essentially a coffee-table book of a dead poets' society, a small but rich anthology of poems by 20th-century practitioners who influenced Merwin.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Counterpoint has gotten W. S. Merwin to do a service his poetic peers ought to emulate: to present favorite poems by favorite contemporaries. Merwin prefaces his selection with an imitation of that glory of middle Scots verse, Dunbar's 1505 "Lament for the Makaris" (makaris means poets). In it, Merwin voices his conviction of immortality because of the endurance of the words of 23 mentors and coevals whom he salutes in the order of their deaths, from Dylan Thomas' in 1953 to James Merrill's in 1995. The 23 include a substantial number of the greatest modernists in English: Stevens, Williams, Frost, Roethke, Eliot, Auden, Moore, Pound, etc., and also the less lionized Muir, MacNiece, David Jones, etc. The selections are less frequently anthologized poems by their authors (MacNiece's "Autumn Journal VII" in particular ought to be better known, especially by wagers of the current culture wars). Though not easy reading, a superb collection. Ray Olson

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