W.S. Merwin: Collected Poems 1952-1993 & Collected Poems 1996-2011.

"Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color": First Edition of the Collected Poems of W.S. Merwin in Two Volumes; Each Signed by Him

W.S. Merwin: Collected Poems 1952-1993 & Collected Poems 1996-2011.

MERWIN, W.S.

Item Number: 3209

New York: Library of America, 2013.

First edition of the collected poems of this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Octavo, original black cloth, two volumes. Both volumes are signed by W.S. Merwin on the title page. Both volumes are fine in fine dust jackets in a fine slipcase. Edited by J.D. McClatchy.

Oracular and elegant, W. S. Merwin’s poetry reveals a heightened sense of what is essential to human consciousness: the fragile framing of nature, the mysteries of memory and perception, the inescapable fact of our mortality. In a career spanning seven decades— from his brilliant emergence as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize in 1952 to his recent term as U.S. Poet Laureate—he has fashioned a poetics unmistakably his own, marked by a stripped-down, unpunctuated style that foregrounds his responsiveness, spiritual insights, and facility with unadorned, elemental language. Now, with this two-volume edition, Merwin becomes only the second living poet to have his work collected by The Library of America. Here are such landmark books as his debut volume A Mask for Janus (1952), which shows the young poet engaged in a fruitful dialogue with Auden and Berryman; The Lice (1967), with its impassioned political poems about the Vietnam War and ecological catastrophe; The Vixen (1996), which offers vivid recollections of southwestern France; the epic verse novel The Folding Cliffs (2008), set in nineteenth-century Hawaii; and The Shadow of Sirius (2008), with its “late poems / that are made of words / that have come the whole way / they have been there.”

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