W. S. Merwin Knihy

A 95 page biography by W.S. Merwin precedes Chamfort's selected writings, along with an introduction by essayist-critic Louis Kronenberger. A poet and translator, Merwin sheds light on the man while Chamfort (1740-1794) is shedding light on his world.

The classic and deeply moving memoir by Pablo Neruda, the most widely read political poet of our time and winner of the Nobel Prize The south of Chile was a frontier wilderness when Pablo Neruda was born in 1904. In these memoirs he retraces his bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and in Mexico; and his service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over the Andes and then to Europe; his travels took him to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China before he was finally able to return home in 1952. The final section of the memoirs was written after the coup in 1972 that overthrew Neruda's friend Salvador Allende. Many of the century's most important literary and artistic figures were Neruda's friends, and figure in his memoirs--Garcia Lorca, Aragon, Picasso, and Rivera, among them--and also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara. In his uniquely expressive prose, Neruda not only explains his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he creates a revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot, and one of the twentieth century's true men of conscience.

The winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Craig Arnold’s Shells, which was acclaimed as “a gifted collection of daring writing” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. “Friendships based on food,” Arnold writes, “are rarely stable”—this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.

“Metaphors, puns, surrealist visions, converted into sharp, disturbing little narratives . . . only a poet, and a good one, could have written it.” — The Atlantic MonthlyW.S. Merwin’s acclaimed short prose pieces — many of which first appeared in The New Yorker — blur the distinction between fiction, poetry, essay, and memoir. Reminiscent of Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, they evoke mythical patterns and unlikely adventures and raise questions about art, reality, and meaning. As the, itself fabled, Saturday Review once remarked, the prose pieces have “astonishing range and power.”The Book of Fables comprises all the short prose from two of Merwin's out-of-print collections, The Miner’s Pale Children and Houses and Travellers. The pieces run from a single sentence to a dozen pages and create a poetic landscape both sere and sensuous.

Voices is a collection of poetic aphorisms written over several decades by Antonio Porchia and translated by W.S. Merwin. Spontaneous, succinct, and wise, these aphorisms have the spiritual character of the world's great religions-especially Buddhist and Taoist epigrams-and the subtle attention to language of our best literature. Voices is Porchia's only book, which he augmented and revised throughout his life. By the time of his death, it had become a classic, published in over a dozen different Spanish-language editions; today there are also translations into German, French, and Italian. This new bilingual edition, revised and updated with an introduction by Merwin, brings back into print one of Latin America's great literary enigmas.

Brings back into print all the poems from The Compass Flower (1977), Feathers from the Hill (1981), and Opening the Hand (1983).

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, a collection that gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations.From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Glück, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.Other poets Sylvia PlathJames MerrillAmy clampittJorie GrahamW. S. MerwinCharles SimicAllen GinsbergFrank O'HaraAnne SextonRobert CreeleySharon OldsMary OliverRobert PinskyMark StrandDenise LevertovRichard WilburMay SwensonMichael PalmerMark DotyYusef Komunyakaa

Zvedněme hlavu z proudu dní, kterým se necháváme nést, a rozhlédněme se – kam to vlastně máme namířeno? K úvahám potřebujeme klid, tak opusťme město přeplněné lidmi. Bude stačit pouť lesem, při které nohama rozhrnujeme listí? Aspoň jediný tichý týden přemítat v lesních samotách! „Člověk je tím bohatší, čím méně má věcí, o které se musí starat. (…) Šel jsem do lesů, poněvadž jsem chtěl žít uvážlivě, utkat se s podstatou života… Nechtěl jsem žít tím, co není život, vždyť žití je cosi tak vzácného, a nechtěl jsem žít odevzdaně – to jen kdyby nic jiného nezbývalo. Přál jsem si žít všemi smysly a zcela vysát morek života, žít tak zásadově a spartánsky, abych se odpoutal od všeho, co není život.“ Thoreau líčí život spjatý s přírodou, dva roky prožité uprostřed massachusettských lesů ve srubu postaveném vlastníma rukama. Jeho pohled je inspirující a naléhavě aktuální…

A collection of poems selected by poets as those that first inspired them includes timeless favorites and insightful essays by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners including Roethke, Pinsky, and Heaney.