Customer Reviews (1)

An exposition of the poet's thought
This work is a very clearly written and coherent exposition of the thought of the poet W. S. Merwin. The text is punctuated throughout with illustrative selections from the poetry of Merwin. The central idea is that Merwin is a mythmaker a man devoted to created a mythology which explains Creation and the Universe as a whole.
I was frankly expecting something much different, an analysis of Merwin's poetic method and technique. This is not a central element of the work.
I too must admit that the whole enterprise , the whole idea of the Poet as Mythmaker is not one which strikes home with me. Again the book is clear , well- written and reads the whole of the poet's work until the mid- eighties.
Merwin towards the tail- end of this volume is described asmovingto a more personal and private poetry. A more detailed exposition of that, and the connection of the Life and the Work would have more interested me much more.
But I am only one reader and one kind of reader. ... Read more

Product Description
A perennial bestseller since it was published in Chile nearly 70 years ago, this collection is now offered for the first time in a beautiful gift edition. This superb translation and richly colored illustrations bring the poems of this classic volume vividly to life. Full color. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (51)

Keep it in your back pocket
This book is great because of the side by side espanol and english. The translations retain all the beauty of the language and the poems themselves are excellent.

Neruda poems
While I wanted to come to know the poetry of Neruda and the recognition he received during his life, I found them syrupy and sophomoric. I did appreciate their being side-by-side, English and Spanish so I was able to practice my Spanish translation.
Maybe it's because I am much older and the more current poetry, more edgy.

English Only? Bummer.
I was hoping this would have both the original Spanish and translated English versions; instead it is English only. This takes away from the beauty of the poems, although the translators did a good job.

Beautiful poetry, very romantic, Pablo is a Master at his craft.
This is a wonderful romantic poetry book, Pablo has a way with words that gives you images in your mind and you'll forget everything else around you as you're absorbed into the dream world he has created in your mind.

It is a dual language book having each poem in English and Spanish; it only contains 21 poems but they are of the highest quality and you will be left wanting to read more of his books!

I highly recommend it and if you enjoyed this you will also like his "100 Love Sonnets" and his "Love Poems"

Another book that's writen in a sensual way but also contains some humorous poems is "The Poetry of Passion (for People with a Pulse)" by Juliette Westbrook-Finch, I also recommend that, very different in that it all rhymes but if you like love poetry you'll love that too.

The Poetry of Passion (for People with a Pulse)

100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Texas Pan American Series) (English and Spanish Edition)

Love Poems (New Directions Paperbook)

Beautiful and romantic. Pablo at his best.
I am a huge fan of Pablo's I have 7 of his books and find his breathtaking way with words beautiful. I love poetry but am very fussy about what I like as some poetry can be boring but Pablo's is wonderful.

This book is in English and Spanish, set out so that the Spanish version of the poem is on the left hand page and the English translatiomn is on the right. (very handy if you're learning Spanish!)

You will find yourself lingering over his poetry as it creates beautiful images in your mind, it's very romantic and sensual.

With lines like "Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets towards your oceanic eyes" and "The light wraps you in its mortal flame" his descriptions and his way with words are wonderful.

I highly recommend his love poetry and this is one of my favourites of his, he has even inspired me to make my work more sensual!

Review by Juliette Westbrook-Finch, author of The Poetry of Passion (for People with a Pulse) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Review and correction
Correction to Amazon: This review seems to also be appearing on the pages of Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam.

The "Selected Poems" we are actually talking about here (ISBN 0-689-70736-3) are W.S. Merwin's from 1952-1983. Since then he has published several more books of poetry, but they probably won't become part of a collection like this any time soon. (Merwin was reluctant to create this one.)

He shouldn't have been so reluctant. This is great, managable and cheap(!) way to meet Merwin, a major poet of our day who people just won't stop talking about. He's the most-published by The Atlantic magazine and he's had a remarkably varied career--as this 'Selection' attests.

His first few books (one of which was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award) are more formal and mythological. In _The Moving Target_ he starts swerving away from punctuation and conventional sytax eventually ending up in a place where...

a man with his eyes shut swam upward
through dark water and came to air
it was the horizon
he felt his way along it and it opened
and let the sun out

Not all of these poems are winners, in my opinion. But this is Merwin's pick of the litter and whatever seems a runt to me may just be bacon to you. Merwin's aesthetic gets more and more transparent that way. Buy it here used.

Oh and P.S. The book in this collection that won the Pulizter was _The Carrier of Ladders_. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wonderful Book!
*I discovered this book shortly after it was published in 1969. It is a wonderful wonderful book of one-to-two sentence sayings which depict so much of life. For example:

"I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received."

"They will say that you are on the wrong road, if it is your own."

"you will find the distance that separates you from them, by joining them."

"We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all."

Get the book -- it is tremendous! ... Read more

Product Description
Renowned natural history photographers David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton have devoted the last decade to capturing images of endangered plants and animals in the United States. Remains of a Rainbow, their groundbreaking and unprecedented coverage of the Hawaiian Islands, transforms these statistics into living beings with faces, unique characteristics, and beauty, through vivid and poignant photographic portraits. With more than 300 images, this splendidly vibrant volume will be showcased in traveling museum exhibitions over the next three years at major natural history venues.

Remains of a Rainbow focuses on the native species that have evolved on the islands of Hawai’i, one of the biologically richest places on Earth, and also one of the most threatened. Working closely with expert field biologists, Liittschwager and Middleton capture images of ecosystems full of new discoveries (species not yet known to science), rediscoveries (species thought to be extinct), and the exotic habitats in which these species fight to survive.

The text and elegant photographs tell a powerful story—of the rare creatures of the world, of little-seen habitats in the wild, of human interference that threatens their survival, and of the people who devote their lives to preserving them. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Beautiful Book
We first saw the hard-back version of this book in the museum on the island of Kauai.We thought it was a wonderful hardback book, but the museum tols us that it could cost $150.00 and was no longer available in any form.Luckily we found it on Amazon in soft cover (which is more than adequate) and for much less money.Truely a beautiful and informative book!

Pretty pictures but don't trust the text
The pictures of rare Hawaiian plants and animals in "Remains of a Rainbow" are pretty.
Pretty uninformative. And the text is largely nonsense.
The tipoff is "rich volcanic soil." When you see that in a book about Hawaiian natural history, you know right away that the author made no effort to learn his subject.
Just a few paragraphs away, we run into a rhapsody about the ancient Hawaiians' respect for the "unity and balance of the natural world." Large, slow, tasty birds excepted, of course.
The text by photographers David Liitschwager and Susan Middleton (assisted by Maui poet W.S. Merwin in an ill-informed introduction) is the verbal equivalent of kudzu -- an exotic, boring growth that smothers the interesting natural stuff underneath. Green goo.
It is understandable why the sponsors of "Remains" -- Environmental Defense and the National Geographic Society -- pander this way. It is not so easy to sell Hawaii's endangered plants and animals on their merits. After all,you and I are not likely ever to encounter most of them.
Which raises a question: If none of us is going to meet them except in the pages of a book, why bother to preserve them in nature? A small herb that was never known to exist until three or four years ago, and which was down to maybe five or 10 individuals then, is not going to alter the islands' ecosystem if it disappears.
One answer to that question is the last word in this book, taken from the writings of the late Maui biologist Wayne Gagne: "We are in pursuit of environmental quality, an ethical stance where our native biota is concerned, and for accepting each natural ecosystem on the planet for what it is . . . each a unique result of multifaceted ecological processes, past, present and continuing."
Fine words, but Liittschwager, Middleton and their sponsorsobviously do not believe they can sell them. So instead of marketing Hawaii for what it is -- a unique place -- they peddle the ecological situation here, which is grim enough in fact, as part of a crisis "of declining biodiversity worldwide."
This is the "sixth great extinction" argument, one of thoseresilient popular ideas for which there is little evidence. People holding such views can find themselves in paradoxical situations.
Middleton, who blows the tin horn of mass extinctions louder than Liittschwager, writes about how after 15 years of working with endangered species, none she had encountered had yet gone extinct. Until Clermontia peleana.
But it turns out that while Clermontia peleana, a Big Island plant, probably is extinct in the wild, it is not yet quite extinct from the Earth.
Middleton does not seem to find any contradiction in simultaneous belief that the world is in the midst of the biggest extinction crisis in 65 million years and the fact that even a specialist in endangered species has yet to encounter one that passed on.
Considering that outsiders Liittschwager and Middleton had the cooperation of dozens of Hawaii's best biologists, they could easily have done better.
For one thing -- and this is another tipoff that the writers have not done their homework -- if they had listened to local experts, they would not have made such a big deal of Hawaii's biological diversity. To call islands with no amphibians, no reptiles, no pines and no ants diverse is perverse.
Instead of revealing and reveling in Hawaii's strange status -- its untypical ecological situation makes it the greatest natural laboratory of evolution -- Liitschwager and Middleton went for the picturesque and shallow.
Their pictures are gorgeous but don't tell much. They mostly were shot against solid backgrounds and display only a partof the organism. There is little hint of how each species functions within its community.
The misleading text of Liittschwager and Middleton is somewhat corrected by thumbnail descriptions of the 142 species illustrated, which were written by local authorities and are reliable.
"Remains of a Rainbow" represents the work of years, with the combined support for publishing from Environmental Defense, the National Tropical Botanical Garden and The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii; along with the on-the-ground help of NTBG, Maui Land & Pineapple Co. and other public-spirited groups.
In an afterword, David Wilcove, senior ecologist of Environmental Defense, writes that the survival of species in desperate straits will rely on "above all, public education."
"Remains of a Rainbow" is so far from contributing to public education that readers will end up knowing less about Hawaii after reading the book than they did before.

Don't get me wrong.....
Now don't get me wrong.This is a wonderful book with beautiful photographs of Native Plants and Animals of Hawaii.The only thing wrong with the Softcover version is that the cover creases so easily.So if you want this book for your own personal library the Hardcover version is preferred.But if it is used as it is meant to be, as a coffee table book, than this is the book to have.

WOW, WOW, WOW, WOW
WOWS on every page. I gave this book to my Mother and Aunt for X-Mass. I wanted one for myself but ran out of cash (dag nab it) This is one of the most AMAZING nature books ever. If you need some brownie points give this as a gift, it will keep you out of the Dog House for YEARS.

Spectacular Photographs
This book contains some of the most spectacular photographs you've seen.Close-ups even a pro would seldom come close to.It's unlikely you'll see many of these in your travels, but it feels like your walking through a Hawaiian tropical jungle as you page through the book.Many of the pages would look great framed for your walls.This is the perfect coffee table book, all of my friends have picked it up and marveled over the interesting plants and flowers, even the non-gardeners. ... Read more

Product Description
Poetry. Asian Studies. This collection furthers Copper Canyon's project of reintroducing Pulitzer Prize winner W.S. Merwin's out-of-print works, drawing together poems from his classic collections Asian Figures, Sun at Midnight, and his two volumes of Selected Translations.Gathered here are translations and versions of poems and aphorisms from Asian languages as varied as Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, Persian, and Vietnamese. The book contains poems from some of the world's greatest writers, including Rumi, Tu Fu, Li Po, and Muso Soseki. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

AMONG THE BEST
My biased view:
The short pieces are siimply fantastic. Witty, profound, or ironic - they capture so much in a few lines. Tantalizing!
The other translations are splendid too.
(The long rhymed poem left me out in the shed. Couldn't take it.
But the whole book is a must-have!)

W.S. Merwin: The Poets' Voice
Not only is W.S. Merwin one of our finest living poets, he also has provided us with the daunting task of translating the poems of Asian writers, making them not only available but emotionally and artistically relevant.No easy job this, but Merwin has takenon the challenge of gathering disparate works from Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese into an immensely readable volume.

Merwin curated this collection well.Not only do we have the opportunity to re-read works by 13th century Rumi, but we also gain access to poets such as Li Po and Tu Fu.The translations reflect the countries of origin and in Merwin's hands the result is a collection of poems that maintain the spare dignity of the originals.Example, a Rumi poem follows:

The moon which the sky never saw
even in dreams
has risen again

bringing a fire
that no water can drown

So here where the body
has its house
and see here my soul

the cup of love has made the one
drunk
and the other a ruin

For a gifted poet to devote a large portion of his career sharing the works of Asian masters is a gift to us, as readers.This is a splendid collection.As Merwin states: 'The practice of translation is plainly impossible and nevertheless indispensable.'Grady Harp, November 06

translating air
Lovely and brilliant!Even if Merwin doesn't "know" any asian languages, he sure pulls one over gorgeously with these works- with great help from the various asian translator/collaborators. Read carefully ofthe Muso Soseki poems, read them into your own being, and you can't help toradiate joy as the poems wash through you! ... Read more

Product Description
W.S. Merwin is one of the most celebrated poets in America. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Tanning Award, his books have long been bestsellers in just about any bookstore's poetry section. Now his work is availableread by the poet himselfin a high-quality digital recording, as a part of Copper Canyon Press's "Poetry: Stick It In Your Ear" series.

This seventy-minute CD features Merwin reading poetry from more than a dozen books. It comes packaged with a small booklet of sample poems and a reader's guide to Merwin's poetry.

W. S. Merwin is the author of nearly fifty volumes of poetry, prose, and translations. He lives in Hawaii.

Also available by W.S. Merwin
First Four Books of Poems
PB $16.00, 1-55659-139-XCUSA
Second Four Books of Poems
PB $15.00, 1-55659-054-7CUSA ... Read more

Product Description
Enjoy new fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and Jane Rogers, nonfiction by W.S. Merwin, and new poems by Merwin, Carl Phillips, Mary Jo Bang, Amit Majmudar, John Gallaher, and Timothy Liu. ... Read more

Product Description
Many Mountains Moving is a literary journal devoted to fostering an appreciation of diverse cultures through literature. This issue, "A Tribute to W.S. Merwin," is a special edition that is a departure from the usual format. It contains twenty-five critical essays that celebrate and analyze the work of poet W.S. Merwin. Also included are an interview with Merwin; new and old poems; archival, handwritten drafts of poems; and a section of photographs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Merwin as poet
That Mr. Merwin may be the finest living American poet, with perhaps the most original and unique voice in American literature, immediately raises the expectations of any work devoted to him. I have been a reader of his since I was a student in San Antonio, Texas. I have been a comprehender of his poetry since I took seriously the poetry of the Latin American and Spanish surrealists. Merwin is not for the faint-hearted. Even his early poems, those collected recently under the title of The First Four Books Of Poetry, though often smacking of poetic exercise, require acute attention to language and definition. This particular collection titled Many Mountains Moving brings all of Merwin's strengths into the light and demonstrates how miraculous the act of moving mountains his poetry achieves. ... Read more