The Pupil Poems

Hailed by Peter Davison in theBoston Sunday Globeas 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 usThe Pupil, a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event. 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 spiritual anguish of our time; the bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong- doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poet's youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poet's sense of a larger mystery: . . . we know from the beginning that the darkness is beyond us there is no explaining the dark it is only the light that we keep feeling a need to account for from "The Marfa Lights" Passionate, rigorous, and quietly profound,The Pupilis an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetrya book that finds W. S. Merwin's singularly resonant voice at the height of its power. From the Hardcover edition.

W. S. Merwin has been awarded most of the major prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry. He and his wife live on Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>