The Pupil: Poems

ISBN: 0375709649

Author: Merwin, W. S.

Condition: New

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the greatest poets of our age the Thoreau of our era (Edward Hirsch) comes a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event that captures the spiritual anguish of our time.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. 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 bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong-doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poets youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poets sense of a larger mystery:... we knowfrom the beginning that the darknessis beyond us there is no explainingthe dark it is only the lightthat we keep feeling a need to account for-from The Marfa LightsPassionate, rigorous, and quietly profound, The Pupil is an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetry-a book that finds W. S. Merwins singularly resonant voice at the height of its power.