The Ends of the Earth: Essays [Hardcover]

W.S. Merwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 2004

Pulitzer Prize-winning W. S. Merwin is widely acknowledged as one of the finest living poets in English. Less well known is the power and range of his work in prose. For his first new prose collection in more than ten years, The Ends of the Earth, Merwin has gathered eight essays that show the breadth of his imagination and sympathy. A memoir of George Kirstein, publisher of The Nation, stands alongside one of Sydney Parkinson, explorer, naturalist and artist on Captain James Cook’s Endeavour. A wonderful portrait of the French explorer of Hawai’i Jean-François Galaup de La Perouse is followed by a visit to the Neanderthal skeleton of Boffia Bonneval. There are treks through the Hawaiian forests, to the Holy Mountain of Athos, and with the butterflies in Mexico. For this magical and wondrous journey we have as our guide the excited and concise poet-naturalist, writing at the top of his form.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection by the distinguished poet initially presents a challenge. The opening essay is a memoir of George Kirstein, longtime publisher of the Nation and for even longer a friend of Merwin's. But Kirstein does not come sharply into focus until Merwin shifts from an almost journalistic account of Kirstein's personal history to recounting his firsthand experiences and observations of his friend. The rest of the collection has a very different tone and emphasis. The essay "Reflections of a Mountain" takes the reader on a journey that begins in Venice with "the feeling of stepping-stones sinking under the feet they help to cross" and then moves to the Holy Mountain, with its monasteries and churches, of Athos, which (depending on whom you ask) may or may not be part of Greece. Merwin brings a graceful, unhurried style to his travels through Athos and evokes a landscape imbued with history, meaning, and natural and manmade beauty. This piece is complemented by later essays on the lives and explorations of Sydney Parkinson, the naturalist and artist who sailed with Capt. James Cook, and the travels and travails of the 18th-century French naval officer and explorer François Galaup de La Perouse. The Parkinson essay, like two shorter pieces about the plight of the monarch butterfly, occasionally suffers from an academic tone, and the La Perouse piece goes on a little longer than it needs to, but for the most part, these travelers and the natural world that enthralled them make fascinating subjects in Merwin's skillful hands.
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From Booklist

In his poetry, which is treasured the world over, distinguished man of letters Merwin is profoundly attentive to the sensuousness of place and to the way places change over time. These keen interests also inform his essays, and in his first prose collection since The Lost Upland (1992), he adroitly interleaves natural and human history. A shared love of the sea instigated a friendship between Merwin and George Kirstein, former publisher of the Nation, and the ocean seems to shape Merwin's gloriously rolling and rhythmic sentences as he profiles his late friend, as well as Sydney Parkinson--an artist onboard Captain James Cook's first circumnavigation of the earth who inspires Merwin to reflect on our attempts to name and order the natural world--and the French explorer Jean-Francois Galaup de La Perouse, the first European to explore Hawaii. Merwin also vividly chronicles the circumstances currently endangering the flora and fauna of Hawaii and the Mexican wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly. Elegant and erudite, Merwin's humanistic and ecologically astute essays have vision and backbone. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (March 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593760302
• ISBN-13: 978-1593760304
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,935,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

W.S. Merwin is the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translations. He has earned every major literary prize, most recently the National Book Award for 'Migration: New and Selected Poems' and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 'The Shadow of Sirius.' He lives in Hawaii where he raises endangered palm trees.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars From the ends of the earth to the end of the earth, July 12, 2010

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ends of the Earth: Essays (Paperback)

W.S. Merwin is better known as a poet, but I for one appreciate his prose writing, both its content and its craftsmanship. THE ENDS OF THE EARTH is a collection of eight essays, three somewhat lengthy (47 to 84 pages) and five shorter ones (9 to 26 pages).

The first in the collection, a warm and literate portrait of Merwin's close friend George Kirstein (for 13 years the owner and publisher of "The Nation"), stands by itself. The remaining seven essays are related in a subtle way. They deal with the monasteries of Mt. Athos, the desecration of the Hawaiian Islands, the winter sanctuaries in Mexico for migrating monarch butterflies, the circumnavigation voyages of Capt. James Cook (1768 to 1771) and Jean-Francois Galaup de La Pérouse (1786 to 1789(?)), and the remains of a Neanderthal discovered in 1908 near La Chapelle-aux-Saints in the Dordogne.

The settings or locales for these seven essays are exotic and far-flung, and in that sense they are "FROM the ends of the earth". But running through them is a strong and silent undercurrent, a theme of evanescence, extending from individual men, to cultures and systems of knowing and ways of life, to entire species. There even is, unvoiced, an apprehension that homo sapiens might precipitate "the end of the earth", at least as we know it as home.

Per usual for Merwin, the writing is excellent. These essays are not exciting and they certainly are not for everyone. But if you enjoy learned and literate essays on esoteric matters, meditative in nature, there is a good chance that you will enjoy THE ENDS OF THE EARTH.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very gratifying book., April 10, 2007

By 

Newton Malerman (Abington, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ends of the Earth: Essays (Hardcover)

The book consists of a series of essays by the poet W.S. Merwyn.

Some of the journeys herein are rambles, and you're not quite sure where Mr. Merwyn is headed. The last paragraph of each, however, ties it all together, and sends your mind a-reeling.

A most worthwhile read by a master!