A powerful case can be made for declaring W.S. Merwin the most influential American poet of the last half-century — an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Migration: New and Selected Poems is that case — a distillation of the best poems from a profound body of work, and including a selection of new poems.

As an undergraduate at Princeton, W.S. Merwin was advised by John Berryman to "get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day." Over the last fifty years, Merwin's poetry moved beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engaged a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of W.S. Merwin's work: "I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn't take so much from it into my own life."

In short, Migration: New and Selected Poems is the definitive Merwin volume.

"Mystical formalist, elegant romantic, Vietnam-era protester, translator, maker of sweet memoirs and uneasy dreamscapes, and ecological activist, Merwin has been so prominent for so long that it's hard to believe this rich selection represents the work of just one man. The earliest Merwin — a melancholy 1950s craftsman — gets the first 70 pages, including the bejeweled verse fairy tale 'East of the Sun and West of the Sun.' The haunting free verse of the next two decades includes the sad, urgent protest poems of The Lice (1967) and the Pulitzer Prize — winning The Carrier of Ladders (1970). Merwin's attraction to instinct and mystery drew his poems toward totemic, resonant images, in lines which imitated chants and prayers. The Rain in the Trees (1988) concerned the forests and coasts of Hawaii, where the poet still lives. His longer, more recent works offer personal memories; 'Testimony' (from 1999's The River Sound) takes 56 pages to run through the poet's whole life. Even there — and in the few, lyrical, controlled new poems at the very end of the volume — Merwin retains a sense of terse whispering, and a graceful attraction to silence; his verse comes, if anyone's does, from 'the eye of the mind where we know/ from the beginning that the darkness/ is beyond us.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The publication of W. S. Merwin's selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world....Merwin is one of the great poets of our age." Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[Migration] shows W.S. Merwin to be an artist who has never ceased to challenge himself and his readership." Library Journal

"Merwin has migrated within the universe of poetry, too....Complex, spiritual, and evocative, Merwin is a major poet, and this is a sublime measure of his achievements." Booklist

"These poems are archaic, alliterative and narrative....Like the old stories they evoke, they are little allegories of captured and held attention." New York Times

This definitive volume by one of America's greatest poets is essential for all poetry collections.

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Mallorca, and Portugal; for several years afterward he made the greater part of his living by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese. His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, the Bollingen Award, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of dozens of books, the most recent of which is The River Sound. He currently lives in Hawaii.