Customer Reviews

Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions Paperbooks, No)

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I've loved this book for more than 30 years. It's not that Merton's an extraordinary poet-- he isn't. He makes beautiful poems, not extraordinary ones; but even a rascal can admire the fortifying intelligence that makes everything Merton writes important. It's not even the customary New Directions production-- immaculate and free, sure and devoted, as always. An American treasure this publishing company is! Included is a devoted, even loving, appreciation of Merton's poems by poet Mark van Doren (I dont know if it's found in the Collected Poems). Love for Selected Poems endures because it's from his poems that Merton incontestably emerges as a soul in the form of art. His faith is his art. Nothing's stronger-- not criticism, inscrutable public thirst, Cistercian censors.. There are intense and nearly infinite layers to Merton's prose. The poems are naked. He knew they must be and he allowed them to be naked. "..All the curtains are arranged/Not for hiding but for seeing out.." The poems are Merton's home. It's to his poems that he'll take a homely idea and make it strong, and take a unmonked sentiment and give it shelter. Merton's humanity NEVER has to fetch a witness in his poems. He stands there willing, even unpolished in his glaring humanity at times, drawing as pure hearted a breath as a man ever drew, and prayer in the form of poems you could diagram a life by. Don't make the mistake of passing this book by.