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W. S. Merwin was born in
New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in
Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in
France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the
world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He has written many books of
poems, prose, and translations. He has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including
the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (of which he is now a
Chancellor), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize in
Poetry; most recently he has received the Governor's Award for
Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the
art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the
Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
He lives and works on Maui, where he maintains a garden of rare palm trees.
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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 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.
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At the pinnacle of a grand and prolific career, W. S. Merwin has given us a shimmering new verse translation of the central section of Dante's Divine Comedy -- the Purgatorio.
Led by Virgil, inspired by his love for Beatrice, Dante makes the arduous journey up the Mountain of Purgatory, where souls are cleansed to prepare them for the ultimate ascent to heaven. Presented with the original Italian text, and with Merwin's notes and commentary, this luminous new interpretation of Dante's great poem of sin, repentance, and salvation is a profoundly moving work of art and the definitive translation for our time.
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