The Changing Light at Sandover

About James Merrill

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.

J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser are James Merrill’s literary executors. J. D. McClatchy has published six volumes of poetry and two collections of essays. He teaches at Yale and is the editor of The Yale Review. Stephen Yenser has written three books of criticism (one about Merrill) and a volume of poems. He is a professor of English and the director of Creative Writing at UCLA.

James Merrill’s Collected Poems is available in Knopf paperback. The Voice of the Poet: James Merrill is available from Random House Audio.

About J.D. McClatchy

J. D. McClatchy is the author of five earlier books of poems and three collections of prose. He has served as the editor of many books, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and has written thirteen opera libretti that have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, and elsewhere. McClatchy teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review. He lives in New York City and Stonington, Connecticut.

Praise

“An astonishing performance . . . As near to [a masterpiece] as anything that American poetry has produced in the last two or three decades.” —The New York Review of Books

“James Merrill has created a poem as central to our generation as The Waste Land was to the one before.” —The New Leader

“In turns comic, elegiac, and darkly prophetic, Sandover is as ambitious in scope as it is audacious in concept . . . combining an epic intent with dramatic and lyric meanings and means. The result may be the greatest long poem an American has yet produced.” —Newsweek