Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS.
Honored as one of the "Best Books of the Year" from Publishers Weekly.
"In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style." —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books
“Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[The Shadow of Sirius is] the very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy." —Harold Bloom
"[Merwin's] best book in a decade—and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom." —Publishers Weekly
"Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence." —Orion
"[The Shadow of Sirius] shows the earthly possibilities of simple completeness in a writer's mature work. More than an achievement in poetry, this is an achievement in writing." —Harvard Review
The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin’s new book of poems. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound—the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” In “Photographer,” Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by “someone who understood.” In “Empty Lot,” Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
W.S. Merwin, author of over fifty books, is America’s foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: Migration won the National Book Award, and Present Company received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
Review
"[Manning is] the literary guardian of a way of life he feels is vanishing from small-town Kentucky and America... [“The Gone and the Going Away”] maintains his fidelity to rural themes, recapturing a lost world for readers to remember and preserve....Although Manning has been lauded throughout the country for his work — garnering accolades from some of the major poets of our time, like W.S. Merwin, in addition to the numerous awards he has received — he has found his place in this literary life, wearing it now as effortlessly as the patterned chambray shirts he favors. He is a man of the people, intent on bringing poetry and scenes of rural beauty to them, words of the past, but also the present — the poetry of preservation, of all of us."—Jason Howard,
Leo Weekly "I'm no smarty-pants about poetry, but I do like words and I like good folks. It took just two lines into the opening poem in Maurice Manning's collection called The Gone and the Going Away, and I knew I was headed for some good words about interesting folks. . .This collection is a world I expect to dip into regularly."—Julie Isgrigg, Indie Fresh Press
Synopsis
Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Featured on NPR's Fresh Air and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.
Honored as one of the Best Books of the Year from Publishers Weekly.
In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style. --Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books
Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.--Los Angeles Times Book Review
The Shadow of Sirius is] the very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy. --Harold Bloom
Merwin's] best book in a decade--and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom. --Publishers Weekly
Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence. --Orion
The Shadow of Sirius] shows the earthly possibilities of simple completeness in a writer's mature work. More than an achievement in poetry, this is an achievement in writing. --Harvard Review
The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin's new book of poems. I have only what I remember, Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound--the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and our long evenings and astonishment. In Photographer, Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by someone who understood. In Empty Lot, Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can't help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
W.S. Merwin, author of over fifty books, is America's foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: Migration won the National Book Award, and Present Company received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
Synopsis
Merwin is American poetry's eminence gris--winner of every major literary prize this country offers.
Synopsis
Poetry. The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin's new book of poems. "I have only what I remember," Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound-the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well- cultivated loves, and "our long evenings and astonishment." In "Photographer," Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by "someone who understood." In "Empty Lot," Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can't help but ask: How shall we mine our lives? W.S. Merwin, author of over fifty books, is America's foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: MIGRATION won the National Book Award, and PRESENT COMPANY received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
Synopsis
A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize-winning poet, with over 30 poems never previously published together in English, including the 13 poems from the final Polish collection, Enough.
Synopsis
A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize–winning poet that includes, for the first time in English, all of the poems from her last Polish collectionOne of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.
Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English.
Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance” (The New Yorker).
Synopsis
With The Gone and the Going Way, Pulitzer finalist Maurice Manning returns us to the beloved and lamented lives and landscape of the hill people of his native Kentucky.
Synopsis
Welcome to “Fog Town Holler,” Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Mannings glorious rendering of a landscape not unlike his native Kentucky. Conjuring this mythical place from his own roots and memories — not unlike E. A. Robinsons Tilbury Town or Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County — Manning celebrates and echoes the voices and lives of his beloved hill people.
In Fog Town Holler men have “funny names,” like Tiny Too and Eula Loom. A fox is known as Redleg Johnny. A neighbor issues a complaint against an early-rising rooster; another lives in the chicken coop. “Lawse,” a woman exclaims, “the sun cant hardly find this place!” But they feel the Lord watching, always, as the green water of Shoestring Branch winds its way through hillbilly haunts and memories.
The real world no longer resembles the one brought so vividly to life in the poems in these pages, but through his meditations on his boyhood home, Manning is able to recapture what was lost and still, yet, move beyond it. He brings light to this place the sun cant find and brings a lost world beautifully, magically, once again into our present.
About the Author
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923 - 2012) was born in Poland and worked as a poetry editor, translator and columnist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
CLARE CAVANAGH, professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Northwestern, has received a PEN Translation Award for her work, with STANISLAW BARANCZAK, on Szymborska's poetry.