Migration: New & Selected Poems [Paperback]

W.S. Merwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2007

Named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times.

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

“The poems in Migration speak a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection.”—National Book Award judges’ statement

“The publication of W. S. Merwin’s selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world.”—Los Angeles Times

W. S. Merwin is the most influential American poet of the last half-century—an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Migration: New and Selected Poems is that case. This 540-page distillation—selected by Merwin from fifteen diverse volumes—is a gathering of the best poems from a profound body of work, accented by a selection of distinctive new poems.

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to “get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day.” Migration represents the bounty of those prayers. Over the last fifty years, Merwin’s muse has led him beyond the formal verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of Merwin’s work: “I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.”

W. S. Merwin is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translation. He lives in Hawaii, where he raises endangered palm trees.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mystical formalist, elegant romantic, Vietnam-era protester, translator, maker of sweet memoirs and uneasy dreamscapes, and ecological activist, Merwin has been so prominent for so long that it's hard to believe this rich selection represents the work of just one man. The earliest Merwin—a melancholy 1950s craftsman—gets the first 70 pages, including the bejeweled verse fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Sun." The haunting free verse of the next two decades includes the sad, urgent protest poems of The Lice (1967) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Carrier of Ladders (1970). Merwin's attraction to instinct and mystery drew his poems toward totemic, resonant images, in lines which imitated chants and prayers. The Rain in the Trees (1988) concerned the forests and coasts of Hawaii, where the poet still lives. His longer, more recent works offer personal memories; "Testimony" (from 1999's The River Sound) takes 56 pages to run through the poet's whole life. Even there—and in the few, lyrical, controlled new poems at the very end of the volume—Merwin retains a sense of terse whispering, and a graceful attraction to silence; his verse comes, if anyone's does, from "the eye of the mind where we know/ from the beginning that the darkness/ is beyond us." (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Migration is an apt title for this generous collection, given that Merwin has migrated far from his boyhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he studied with R. P. Blackmur and John Berryman at Princeton, and W. H. Auden chose his first book, A Mask for Janus, as the 1952 Yale Series of Younger Poets winner. But rather than dwell within the precincts of the American academy, Merwin left for Europe, became an adept and prolific translator, and eventually settled in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palm trees and works to restore and preserve the wild, endeavors that deepen his already profound rapport with nature, the soul of his work. Merwin has migrated within the universe of poetry, too, moving from solidly constructed, tactile, and dramatic works to airy, abstract, unpunctuated, and contemplative poems, a journey beautifully mapped here in selections from 15 previous collections, capped by a gathering of new poems. Complex, spiritual, and evocative, Merwin is a major poet, and this is a sublime measure of his achievements. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 570 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556592612
• ISBN-13: 978-1556592614
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #302,068 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

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars W.S. Merwin: A Poet of Vision and Connection, November 30, 2006

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Migration: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

At last there is a significantly large volume of the majestic poetry of W.S. Merwin. Not that all of his other volumes of poems published through the years by Copper Canyon Press have been minor: the length of the books does not begin to mimic the towering power of his work.

But here in MIGRATION: NEW & SELECTED POEMS we have enough of his life's work to truly appreciated the fact that he is an exceptional thinker, artist, involved human being, as well as a gifted man of letters. Winning the National Book Award in 2005 this volume belongs in the collection of everyone concerned with great literature and great poetry. Spanning from the past forty odd years of writing, the collection presents some of his finest older works as well as introducing some of the mystical new works that edge him toward Poet Laureate of America. Example:
Lark

In the hour that has no friends
above it
you become yourself
voice
black
star burning in cold heaven
speaking well of it
as it falls from you
upward

Fire
by day
with no country
where and at what height
can it begin
I the shadow
singing I
the light

This book is rich in such wonders. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, November 06

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A solid best-of-the-best addition to poetry shelves., December 2, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Migration: New & Selected Poems (Paperback)

Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry, Migration: New & Selected Poems collects poems from fifteen different volumes written by W.S. Merwin, one of the most influential modern American poets. Eight of the poems are new, created circa 2004; the rest of this vast compendium offers works that span half a century, to as early as 1952. Experimenting with a wide variety of verbal form and function, the individual compositions of Migration range from momentary mirth to placid insight to storytelling. A solid best-of-the-best addition to poetry shelves. "Glimpse of the Ice": I am sure now / A light under the skin coming nearer / Bringing snow / Then at nightfall a moth has thawed out and is / Dripping against the glass / I wonder if death will be silent after all / Or a cry frozen in another age

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These many poems by Merwin? Wow and wonderful., August 6, 2009

By 

Rachelle Benveniste "Rachelle Benveniste" (Los Angeles, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Migration: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

I read one poem by Merwin on [...] which reminded me how much I love his poetry. And that poem(title: Spring Lost?) moved me to get this beautiful book of poems. His poems nourish my spirit and soul. I don't know what I would do without poetry and W.S. Merwin is a master of his craft and the rich substance within.
Rachelle Benveniste