Product Description
James Merrill himself once called his body of work “chronicles of love and loss,” and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life—comic and haunting, exotic and domestic—to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. This volume rings together the best of Merrill—from the domestic rupture of “The Broken Home” to the universal connections of “Lost in Translation”; from the American storyteller of “The Summer People” to the ecologically motivated satirist of “Self-Portrait in a TyvekTM Windbreaker.” Merrill dazzles at every turn, and this balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to the work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars.

Log
Then when the flame forked like a sudden path
I gasped and stumbled, and was less.
Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,
Dear light along the way to nothingness,
What could be made of you but light, and this? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Generous with His Curiosity and Delight
I'm reading the complete/selected/collected of many late 20th century poets these days and was extremely gratified with the work of James Merrill. I think the most outstanding quality of his work, when compared to that of most of the others, is the fact that he maintains a sense of humor and delight from the first poems published in 1951 to the last, written in 1995. I don't think Merrill is out to impress anyone; to please them, perhaps, but not to dazzle with erudition or intellect. Meanwhile, he's a very clever manipulator of rhyme and meter, and I particularly enjoyed the poems that alternated ballad stanzas with terza rima to keep the narrative from grinding down into the predictable rhythm of either. He's smart, well read, and well traveled and has obvious fun juggling all three in these performances. Nothing seems to have escaped his voracious curiosity, or the generosity with which he shares it with his readers.

I think some of these are new
I'm not entirely sure but I have an awful lot of James Merrill poetry books(he's kind of a favorite)
and some of these early poems I think may have been previously unreleased.
Someone I know who is an expert thinks they may be just collected differently, but it's nice to discover
that his youthful poems were asamazing, in a different way, as his more mature ones!
Some of the ones I read chronicle the life of a young gay man. I love his smile on the cover, too!
Disclaimer: Have not finished the entire book yet. ... Read more

Product Description
The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."

This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.

Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Nothing short of astounding
Merrill doesn't need another admirer, but my gratitude compels me to write.This volume is further proof that the gulf between great poetry and all the mediocre stuff is immense.Genius exists--and Merrill has it in abundance.Mastery of craft, breadth of vision, depth of emotion, intensity of intellect--Merrill's work reveals all the hallmarks of greatness.An extraordinary and generous accomplishment.I will read this book as long as I'm alive.

On Merrill
Merrill requires no introduction.This is a splendid and comprehensive volume.It is a monolith, which commemorates the work of one of America's outstanding contemporary poets.

This collection includes some truly marvelous work: "The Drowning Poet," "Entrance From Sleep," "Poem in Spring," "Willow," "Walking At Night," "An Urban Convalescence," "The World and the Child," and "My Father's Irish Setters," to name a few.

I enthusiastically recommend this anthology.It serves as a means to remember that poetry of the Western hemisphere is capable of transcendent vision--that the Muses can still sing to twentieth century scribes.

Magnificent!
Though occassionally less perfect, these poems scratch the edges of brilliance with every sweep of the pen.They are immaculate, dense, allusive, elusive, and always beautiful.Spend two days with "Charles on Fire" alone and you'll understand why Merrill was--no, IS --so widely admired.You should own this book.

Bull Market for Poetry
Weighing in at almost 900 pages, this book holds just about all the Merrill you'll ever need outside of "Sandover."Merrill wrote exactly the kind of poems I used to think of as "real" poetry--stately, measured, clever & bittersweet, with lots of exquisite images to savor along the way.So why does this writing feel so stuffy and distant to me now?Reading a Merrill poem is somewhere between doing a crossword and shopping for antiques--you exercise the brain and always find something curious to enjoy, but even the most intimate ones left me strangely unmoved.I know Merrill has a legion of fans, and I can see why--these poems are among the best of their kind.But somehow they reminded me of the good chairs in my mom's living room--you could admire them, but you couldn't sit down. Still, the editors have done an excellent job and you'll enjoy going through this handsome book to make up your own mind.

Treasure Chest
James Merrill was the greatest American poet of his generation, and while he was alive, one of the most important poets writing in English.This collection presents just about every poem that Merrill finished, apart from the long poem, *The Changing Light at Sandover* (the "ouija board poem").That means that there are about 44 poems in here that no one's ever seen, plus uncollected poems from Merrill's first volume and the complete text of a 1974 collection called *The Yellow Pages*, which would be REALLY hard to get elsewhere.

Merrill was a virtuoso from the start, but his early poems - mostly from the first book - are, more often than not, somewhat too too, if you know what I mean.Still, they are better made than anyone else's first poems, and some of them are fine.They are show-pieces of a big prodigious boy.

Starting with some poems in *The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace* and more in *Water Street*, Merrill started to make some of the finest lyric poems in modern English.After *Nights and Days* (1966), Merrill was unrivalled.

There is no poem in this volume that is not worth the time and the effort.All of the great poems are here, such as "The Broken Home", "Days of 1964" and "Lost in Translation" and everything in the great valedictory performance, *A Scattering of Salts* .But, sometimes Merrill is at his most sublime in miniature lyrics such as "A Downward Look," and "Little Fallacy."

Even if you already own the *Selected Poems* or *From the First Nine*, you still need this.It's expensive but it will pay you back for the rest of your life.Find the money and buy this book. ... Read more

Product Description
James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years.Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world.
The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, and utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Profound
Admittedly, Merrill is not for everyone. His poetry is dense, cyclical, scientific, and at times deliberately aloof. Yet, this post-modern epic poem deserves to be placed alongside T.S. Elliot's "The Wasteland" as one of the great long poems of the 20th century.

(The reviewer was compensated for posting this review.However, the opinion stated in the review is that of the reviewer and the reviewer alone. Further, the reviewer independently selected this product to review and has no affiliation with the product maker/distributor, Amazon or the review requester.)

Casual Read
This book of poetry is a nice collection but I don't think it is for the casual poetry reader like myself.Some of the poems were inspiring and some sorrowful.A nice Sunday afternoon read.

(The reviewer was compensated for posting this review.However, the opinion stated in the review is that of the reviewer and the reviewer alone. Further, the reviewer independently selected this product to review and has no affiliation with the product maker/distributor, Amazon or the review requester.)

Epic of American Epics
I wrote my thesis on the American long poem, and "The Changing Light at Sandover" was part of my reading.I read A LOT for this project.But of all those other books of poetry, this one stayed with me the most.More than his relationship with David Jackson, it's about the nature of human relationships and relationships with people we don't even know but FEEL like we know (ex. Auden's presence).It's long, it's difficult, but it has some of the most powerful moments I've found in modern poetry, and, like with a long novel, one sinks deeply into Merrill's world and words.

Johann von Goethe
Merrill's overwhelming undertaking is to be admired for it's sheer pretense. In his introduction several writers are noted as inspirational however, Goethe's "Faust" is not. Goethe wrote perhaps the greatest epic poem that also became a theatrical production. Faust part 1 is performed with it's glorious tale that in many ways resembles Merrill's go at this theme, replete with angelic choirs and demonic forces. Faust part 2 is seldom performed because of it's other worldly and occult theme. These themes are the stuff of great literature. The element where Goethe is a grand master is that his poem rhymed. I have no quarrel with Merrill's free verse form. Though I find it peculiar that Merrill does not mention Faust; but rather several other writers such as Yeats. I think Merrill might read Faust. The translations are sorely lacking, as so often is the case. The original German is, of course best. My father was an authority on Faust. He translated the original German into English and Russian and it rhymed. Merrill would certainly do himself a great favor and read Faust; if he hasn't already.

Battlefield Sandover
I remember getting a copy of "Divine Comedies" for my birthday as a youngster and being intrigued by the story of "Ephraim," and hearing about two people, JM and DJ, communicating with the dead through a Ouija board, The book has a list of Dramatis Personae that captivated me, for among them were some of my favorite artists like Maya Deren and W H Auden, together with some family relations and celebrities whom I did not know, enough to fill a whole novel.I suppose that Merrill knew he was onto a good thing, for he came back a few years later with a whole magnum opus about these characters and more...Then years later with a book of "Scripts for the Pageant," really milking out the story for all it was worth, in beautiful cascades of verse both lyrical and coruscating--and much of it actual dictations from a heavenly place.

I wasn't sure how much to believe of the back story, or how deeply to believe in the revelations of the divine that DJ and JM were getting through the Ouija.But at one point I was convinced that Merrill was the greatest poet writing in English.Today I think that he was the wealthiest poet writing in English, and all that implies.I know I wanted, like him, to have a fabulous life and know all these famous writers and legends, to move between Venice and Greece and Connecticut (later to Florida) with a different circle of adepts in each location--and to speak to the dead was the icing on the cake, a byproduct surely of charm and, you know, just being open to it.How many Ouija boards did my pals and I wear out, hardly ever getting anything except when I, well, cheated.Although one time this guy called "Ray" came on and claimed that Bobby Kennedy was going to be assassinated.But that had happened ten years before Ray's appearance, so we speculated that poor "Ray" was locked in a black hole or time warp like the characters in Rocky Horror, and that he, whom we suspected was the French writer "Ray" Radiguet, the beloved of Cocteau, could be set free if we all wrote poems about him.

I can't really separate the way I used to feel about Merrill's mastery of form and image, with the picture of his money.Master anthologist J.D. McClatchy (and Stephen Yenser, a poet whom I have praised in the past) have produced a new edition of Sandower, free of the errors that had plagued previous editions.As the book proceeds we get more and more of those small caps that signify dead people speaking--then it gets more tedious, though many will disagree, especially those who think the voices are bringing wisdom beyond the realm of the human.I often wonder what Scientologists make of James Merrill.Perhaps instead of making that ill-advised movie of L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth some years ago, John Travolta might have instead done a film version of The Changing Light at Sandover--would have been perfect when Merchant and Ivory were both still alive.I would have Travolta as JM, Tom Cruise as DJ, Priscilla Presley as Maya Deren, Angela Bassett as Erzulie, Sir Anthony Hopkins as Pythagoras, that guy from The History Boys as Auden, Penelope Cruz as Maria Mitsotaki, and Robert Morse (the actor) as Robert Morse whoever he was in real life.I think a young Arnold Scharzenegger might have done a fine, delicate job as Hans.Tom Wilkinson as Robert Lowell?Patti LuPone as Maria Callas?No--Katey Sagal. ... Read more

Product Description
The first book to cover this major American writer's complete career, James Merrill's Apocalypse is at once a sophisticated work of criticism and an inviting introduction to Merrill's poetry and fiction. Timothy Materer observes that, while Merrill gained fame as a creator of finely crafted lyric poems, he was obsessed with the violence of the modern era and with the threatening reality that underlies everyday experience--themes found throughout his work. Merrill, winner of the National Book Award, Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Critics Award, was a longtime resident of Connecticut who also lived in Athens, Greece, and Key West, Florida. He died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1995.

Materer interprets Merrill's body of work from the perspective of his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, and shows that in his earliest poems and in the volumes preceding The Changing Light, Merrill repeatedly expressed his fear of nuclear holocaust and his sense that some momentous revelation was near at hand.Materer demonstrates how apocalyptic motifs continued to inspire the works Late Settings, The Inner Room, and A Scattering of Salts. In these final volumes, Merrill characterizes himself as"waiting companionably for kingdom come."

James Merrill's Apocalypse is the first book to treat systematically the autobiographical novels, The Seraglio and The (Diblos) Notebook, in which Materer perceives the genesis of Merrill's themes. Making extensive use of the collection of the poet's letters, journals, and papers at Washington University, Materer's appealing and revelatory volume illuminates James Merrill's secure place in American letters at the turn of the century. ... Read more

Product Description
Following James Merrill's widely celebrated Collected Poems and Collected Novels and Plays, this volume gives us, most intimately, the man himself and his charmingly straightforward exploration of how he became himself. As much as any poet of our time, Merrill conceived of his work and his life as warp and woof, and the prose collected here (from his juvenilia and occasional pieces through his critical writings to his interviews and memoir) shows how bound up in his craft (itself a recurrent topic) were his readings and reflections, his travels and friendships. Even Merrill's most devoted readers will be startled anew at the range of his aesthetic concerns and the depth of his knowledge. Dante and Ponge, Cavafy and Montale, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, all figure prominently here, and the volume is shot through with commentary on music, especially opera, and descriptions of the world's great cities-including New York, Paris, Istanbul, and Kyoto-and their cultural treasures. The volume closes resoundingly with A Different Person, Merrill's memoir of his young life, in which he travels to Europe to explore the culture, comes of age as a gay man, and faces down his legacy as the son of the renowned financier Charles E. Merrill.

As Merrill remarks to one interviewer here, a poet is "someone choosing the words he lives by." This volume, a cross section of a singularly complex literary life, showcases the care for verbal nuance and the inimitably varied tones that distinguish this great American writer. ... Read more

Product Description
The tragic death of James Merrill in February 1995 coincided with the publication in hardcover of this, his last book of poems. "In these last poems, lucid, deft, fond, shrewd, faithful, Merrill once again reveals himself as our most visual poet, combining a superb eye with an unfailing ear."--Peter Davison, Boston Globe. ... Read more

Product Description
Relatively little critical attention has been directed towards the explication of James Merrill's difficult poems, much less towards the understanding of his densely-layered symbolism. This is the first comprehensive study to look at Merrill's difficult symbolic system and to provide a close reading of Merrill's epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Adams reads Merrill's poetry through various lenses, primarily those of Freudian psychology and of the Jungian archetypal system. His approach allows the reader to view individual works as part of the larger picture of Merrill's quest to save his life through his art. ... Read more

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Product Description
An invaluable road map for the epic poem of our time.
... Read more

Product Description
Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit.

"[A] remarkable and moving memoir." (The Boston Globe)

"Written with the poignancy of long affection." (The Atlantic Monthly)

"This memoir is Lurie's own Ouija board, through which she shares one final, intimate conversation with her much-missed familiar spirits." (The Washington Post)Amazon.com Review
Written with her characteristic grace, novelist Alison Lurie's memoir of her friendship with the poet James Merrill and his companion David Jackson offers more than reminiscences, though these are tender, frank, and perceptive. Lurie also considers the broader subjects of fame's arbitrary nature and its impact on a relationship, as well as the perils and pleasures of dabbling in the occult. When she first became close to the couple in 1954, all three were struggling young writers. But while Merrill soon became a critically respected poet, and novels like The War Between the Tates made Lurie some money as well as a reputation, Jackson remained unpublished and obscure. He was understandably frustrated, and Lurie suggests that the pair's increasing involvement in sessions on their Ouija board were partly an effort to find an outlet for Jackson's creative energies. These sessions formed the basis for Merrill's long poem "The Changing Light at Sandover" (in Lurie's estimation not the best use of his gifts), and she believes they encouraged the men to become dangerously isolated from the real world. Jackson began to drink more heavily, and his casual affairs grew more irritating to Merrill, who launched a serious relationship with a young actor whose uncritical devotion exacerbated tensions between the longtime lovers. Merrill died of AIDS in 1995; the physically and mentally debilitated Jackson, writes Lurie, "is now a ghost in Key West." Her sensitive recollections bring back the time when they were young, beautiful, and in love, with the world before them. Examining the personal and artistic cost of their decades-long engagement with the spirit world, Lurie asks the always relevant, never resolvable questions, "How much should one risk for art? What chances should one take?" --Wendy Smith ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Friendly Fire
How unfortunate that the self-appointed biographer (though she terms it a memoir) of James Merrill should take such a dull and dreary approach, ploddingly setting about trying to debunk James Merrill & David Jackson's decades of experiences with a Ouija board that so beautifully resulted in Merrill's masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover.

Alison Lurie, by her own admission, recognizes Merrill as "supernaturally brilliant," but his intelligence is so other than or beyond her own that she literally likens him to a Martian. Apparently unable to comprehend the content of Merrill's epic work, and making it clear that she doesn't even like it, Lurie instead settles for a tedious dissection. Smoke, mirrors, string, simplistic attempts at psychoanalyzing Merrill; surely something besides the truth of reality must be behind all of this communicating-with-spirits hocus-pocus. And, contradictorily, her broad condemning brushstrokes at once paint the Ouija experiences as the mere summoning of Merrill and/or Jackson's unconscious mind(s) (she's offended by what the spirits have to say about her) and the dangerous communing with devils and demons.

Perhaps if she had actually read Merrill's books, instead of mining them for ammunition against him, this mean-spirited little book would have had something of value to offer.

Alas, this book reads as little more than a paean to Lurie's dislike of Merrill, and is ultimately more about how SHE feels about her subject than it is about Merrill himself. It's rather sickening to imagine her years of "friendship" with the man, which seem to have been little more than the collecting of criticisms and private details for future use in this petty volume.

This book does a disservice to the passion, commitment and spiritual intensity of the lives and work of James Merrill and David Jackson as so eloquently and painstakingly communicated in Merrill's work. I recommend interested readers go directly to The Changing Light at Sandover, and skip this diluted and negatively biased "memoir."

Wonderful beach read
I seldom read fiction, but I've enjoyed three of Alison Lurie's novels. After my attention fell on the work of James Merrill, and I saw that Alison Lurie had written about him, I ran, not walked, to the library to get her book. It was everything I expected: a wonderful gossip, a further stimulus to read James Merrill's poems, and a work of insight about the literary culture of Key West--which I found even more interesting because I once talked with Alison Lurie and several other writers there at a Key West Festival.

Alison Lurie knew James Merrill and his lover David Jackson for many years. She doesn't allow us to understand why they befriended her, but we have no trouble understanding why she befriended them. They were fun, cultured, intellectual, supportive, and moneyed, and shared interests with Alison Lurie. Jimmy often swam with her and David cooked with her. If this book seems to contain gaps and mysteries, it's probably because Alison Lurie has held back in her account in respect of their friendship. She has done us a favor to tell as much as she does. I was less interested in the theories about the Ouija Board and actually skipped some of her deconstruction of Merrill's poetry. Her defense of David Jackson as co-author of Merrill's work has merit. Jackson, although she doesn't seem to realize it, was (is) a self-destructive personality. His deterioration is self-evident in the anecdote about his angry driving in Italy in 1978, years before Peter Hooten entered Merrill's life. One is forced to wonder how Merrill died of AIDS and the other two remained untouched by it.

eerie cautionary tale
This is a beautifully written long view of the lives of James Merrill, poet, and his lover and uncredited collaborator David Jackson.They dabbled through the ouija board in contact with unseen spirits that supposedly provided the material for Merrill's largest poetic works.The cost to both men of this eerie devotion is trenchantly narrated by Alison Lurie, their friend of many years.The charge that Ms. Lurie is using her connection to Merrill to enhance her own reputation is absurd, as she is far more well known in general than Merrill.

Very gossipy little book. Yetfascinating and embarassing.
In spite of the fact that the author reveals a bit too much of herself in this book (a fact which makes you like and then dislike her sometimes) she does weave an interesting theory about the inner workings of Merrill and Jackson's minds. I didn't feel she presented these men dishonestly, though some fans of Merrill's obviously resented the fact that their god was made to appear as a mere mortal---and a somewhat foolish one at that.

Juicy, gossipy, lewd, audacious at times, you had to imagine she was indeed capitalizing somewhat on her friendship with Merrill because she did not wait for her friend David Jackson to die before she began revealing what a mess he had become. Why? If she were afraid SHE would die without having a chance to add her two cents she could have written the book, but not published it until after Jackson's real death.

I guess it's hard to quarrel with her motives as I read it in one sitting, lapping up all the strange, weird revelations about these men. My respect for them was not diminished by her lurid details of their intimate life. Nothing in Key West is ever ordinary...

What was most fascinating about the book though was the fact that Lurie herself became an equal part of the mystery. Was she obsessed with these men? Secretly in love with Jackson? Jealous of them? Twice she had to say that "they were rich and could buy anything they wanted". Twice!

Sadly, Lurie never did manage to do what she wanted---to comprehend these men. This goal never got quite satisfied, so in the end the reader of this book is not quite satisfied.

It is an important memoir though because it is the ONLY one right now offering any insight into Merrill, the man and the poet.

I think you have to accept the book for exactly what it is, one woman's perspective about two men she was close to---but not close enough to truly understand them. It was an honest attempt on Lurie's part and a courageous one even and it did reveal Lurie's writing talent. For better or worse, she certainly did create a very vivid yet terrifying tale about two utterly amazing lives.

why did it have to end like this?
The story is strongest when she is most generous to her characters and most fully shares her own story within theirs.At times, she writes out of her anger at those who hurt her friends, at them for not staying true to love and beauty, and at the world for its unhappiness.She doesn't have nearly enough distance from JM's spaghetti western svengali and DJ's young black hustlers to write about them for publication.

How could two so full of love have come to such a sad end?The answer, it seems at times, is that gay marriage in our world doesn't have the structuring social context to do the work we expect from marriage.But we need to know more about her, her own loves, her children and her novels in order to speak honestly with her about the long haul.

The ouija board saves the marriage by holding it together under the burden of professional success and failure.And it destroys them both.It ruins JM as a poet -- he writes a beautiful "Book of Ephraim," then two more fat, quick and unreflective books of spirit-writing, then not much else.It draws them away from friends and life into a compelling fantasy they only partly believe in, are afraid of, and that becomes gradually coarser and uglier.As she sees it, James dies bewildered and ruined, while David loses his mind and soul to the devils.

She paints beautiful, vivid portraits of her friends in their youth. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A beautiful life in perfect focus - read with the poems.
When I first expressed interest to my adviser in pursuing work on Merrill, she leaned back slightly, admitting that she had known him, commenting on the sadness of his death, and how beautiful a person he was.With each page of this memoir I discovered anew how much force such a simple statement, such as could be made about many a friend or relative, could have between the anonymous reader and master poet.Perhaps the greatest credit to this fascinating narrative skimming back and forth across oceans of memory, time and water lies in the constant delight of coming across the title phrased within the work.Never overstated, the phrase reverberates effortlessly as JM, (for those who love The Changing Light at Sandover - and this work is, though more than worthy in its own right, ultimately intended and most valuable for those who have read or wish to read Sandover) translates his non-egotistical love of the experience and metamorphosis of the self into a selflessly shared region for his reader to explore, guided by the gentlest of hands."A Different Person" dispenses with a distinction from his poetry.Indeed, I found myself supplying the lines with hidden rhymes, Merrill's voice and its shifting tones of surprise, glee, facility followed by grave discovery, so on.But perhaps unique to our experience is the sense that at a remove from poetic form, the metaphors, images and dramatis personae behave at once with the force we permit in poetry (and tend to ignore as flourishes when reading a biography), and the weight of that which irrevocably occured and influenced a man's life, about which we care deeply.We cannot help but be reminded that we are in a sense writing ourselves, hoping that the nuances of our self-reflection can make good of our experience, as Merrill does of his life, which like the lightening flashes of Oujia inspiration, "dwells all along in a manner of speaking."

Additionally, for those interested in either critical analysis of Merrill's work or simply improving their familiarity with his oeuvre, "A Different Person" offers numerous insights into Merrill's poetics, as in his hope, expressed towards the end of the memoir, for the "perpetual freshening of human language" through slang, dance or Astrophysics.

Nor should it go without mention that Merrill's numerous acquantainces, flings, soirees and hesitant appraisals of this whole world delight throughout.And the prose (if it can be so called) is of course masterful - fluid and deep.

Only fittingly - Ad plures ire, JM ... Read more

Product Description

James Merrill is now widely recognized as one of the essential poets of our time, one of those whose achievement will define postwar American literature. The Consuming Myth is a discerning account of his work that will well serve amateur and initiate alike. Yenser ranges over all of Merrill's writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet's novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Santkver His close readings shed light on Merrill's boldly and subtly original techniques, his kinship with Mallarmé, Proust, Yeats, Stevens, and others, and the network of connections among his diverse undertakings.

Yenser suggests that Merrill's special power springs in part from transactions between evidently opposing perceptions. On the one hand—as the result of some poetic version of what physicists call “pair production”—whatever Merrill looks at hard yields its contraries. All about him, and within him too, he discovers duality and division. On the other hand, he is profoundly aware of the interconnectedness of things, whether they be his life and his art (which we might think of as aspects of his work), or humanity and nature, or good and evil. It is out of quarrels with ourselves that we make poetry, Yeats observed; and it is in striving to accommodate intuitions of both difference and identity that Merrill has fashioned his distinctive manner.

Product Description
Following the widely celebrated Collected Poems, this second volume in the series of James Merrill’s works brings us Merrill as novelist and playwright. Just as in his poems we come upon prose pieces, dramatic dialogue, and even a short play in verse, in his novels and plays we find the rhythms of his poetry reflected and given new form.

Merrill’s first novel, The Seraglio, is a daring roman à clef derived in large part from his early life as the cosmopolitan son of Charles Merrill, one of America’s most famous twentieth-century financiers. Written in a highly refined prose that owes something to Henry James, the book is a compelling portrait of the luxury and treachery swirling around the Southampton beach house of an irrepressible family patriarch, with his many mistresses and ex-mistresses in attendance, told from the point of view of his lively but troubled son. At the other end of the narrative spectrum we find The (Diblos) Notebook, an experimental novel in which a young American’s adventures on a Greek island are deconstructed and assembled into a tentative fiction before our eyes. Merrill’s plays, including the one-act comedy of manners The Bait and the Chekhovian The Immortal Husband—a reinvention of the myth of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth—are also fresh turns on his characteristic themes: home and travel, reality and artifice, simplicity and complication. And, for the first time in print, here is Merrill’s short play The Birthday, a fledgling effort written in 1947 and a fascinating window onto the concern with spiritual communication and the otherwordly that would later blossom into his great epic, The Changing Light at Sandover.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Product Description
James Merrill's new collection, The Inner Room, combines symmetry with surprise.The first and last of its five parts include, in addition to diverse two masterly long poems each ('Morning Glory' and 'A Room at the Heart of Things' in Part I and 'Walks in Rome' and 'Losing the Marbles' in Part V). The central section, an arrangement of shorter poems and a bittersweet meditation written some years ago but not collected until now, is framed by the book's most startling accomplishments. In Part II Merrill returns to the verse drama, a genre that he has not worked in since the 1950s, when 'The Bait' was produced off-Broadway. 'The Image Maker' is an exquisitely fashioned one-act play about a santero, a saint-maker, whose carved figures are objects of veneration and sources of power in his Caribbean village. The santero also practices santeria, the Latin American religion that syncretizes the Yoruba lore which the slaves brought with them from West Africa and the Catholicism imposed on them in their new world. In this exotic context, Merrill rings changes on themes developed in his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Part IV, a sequence entitled 'Prose of Departure, is itself another striking departure from Merrill's recent work. Set mostly in Japan, it intertwines narratives of beginnings and endings even as it intersperses its prose with hokku in a manner reminiscent of Basho's travel journals -- though the delicately managed rhymes set Merrill's cachet upon the form. Among the other work here are poems in Sapphics and in syllabics; a villanelle whose recursions celebrate memory', and a doubled anagram, in which the English poem is shadowed by a French version"

Stephen Yenser

author of The Consuming Myth, The Work of James Merrill ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Valuable life-in-letters approach
The other reviewer apparently had only volume 2 of the two-volume gift edition of this book issued for subscribers.The book appeared in that format and in a one-volume trade edition.I have the trade edition and I can vouch for its valuable blending of text by Merrill Peterson, a sage and worthy scholar of this period, and letters and other writings by Madison himself.This is one of the best volumes in the short-lived NEWSWEEK "The Founding Fathers" series.

A snippet of James Madison
The copy I had, oddly starts at Chapter 6 at a page in the 200's. The book is not really in his own words but rather a bio with his letters included. Compared to more current bi-ops, this book falls a litle flat. ... Read more

Product Description
Dolly Madison: Quaker Girl (1944 Orange Hardcover Printing) by Helen A. Monsell. Published in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA by Bobbs Merrill in 1944. Limited Collector's Edition. Rare Book. 192 Pages. Tells the story of First Lady, Dolly Madison when she was young (married later to 4th USA President , George Madison). Her maiden name was Dolly Payne. Her full name was Dorothea Dandridge Payne Todd "Dolley" Madison. Not to be confused, of course, with the snack cakes. For more biographical information, please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolley_Madison/ ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Dolley Payne Todd Madison
I am reviewing the 1944 edition of this book.

This children's book does a good job of describing Dolley Madison to young people.It is an interesting blend of fact and fiction.Much of the dialogue is surely made up by the author.But the dialogue serves the purpose of showing kids what life was like for Dolley in her early years. And it provides an idea of how she may have thought as a child. This book also contains many black and white illustrations showing various events from Dolley's life.

Dolley Payne grew up on a plantation with slaves near Richmond, Virginia.Her father, John Payne, was a Quaker who fought in the Revolutionary War.After the War, Payne freed his slaves and moved the family to Philadelphia.Unfortunately, Mr. Payne was more successful with his plantation than he was as a Philadelphia businessman.

In Philadelphia, Dolley met her first husband, John Todd. Unfortunately, Mr. Todd and their baby died from yellow fever.Dolley also contracted the fever but survived.

Aaron Burr was the unlikely matchmaker who brought Dolley and James Madison together.Eventually, the couple moved to Washington, DC, from Philadelphia. Dolley acted as hostess at the White House during Jefferson's Presidency. And then she was First Lady in her own right during James Madison's Presidency.During that time she was the only First Lady who had to flee the White House because of a British invasion.

Dolley Madison was pretty, warm and cheerful. She brought happiness to many.So children and adults can both enjoy this uplifting book. ... Read more