W. S. Merwin Books

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.

When it appeared in 1924, this work launched into the international spotlight a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. W. S. Merwin's incomparable translation faces the original Spanish text. Now in a black-spine Classics edition with an introduction by Cristina Garcia, this book stands as an essential collection that continues to inspire lovers and poets around the world.The most popular work by Chile's Nobel Prize-winning poet, and the subject of Pablo Larraín's acclaimed feature film Neruda starring Gael García Bernal.

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

In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin in the woods surrounding Walden Pond. Here he conducted a two-year social experiment, removing himself almost entirely from society while instead engaging with the sounds, the animals and the passers-by that inhabited the wilderness. In this isolation he built his own shelter and sourced his own food, testing the limits of his capacity to be self-reliant. From this experience the masterpiece Walden emerged; it is Thoreau's manifesto for simplicity, self-sufficiency and detachment from the unnecessary constructs of urban societies and economies. Thoreau's thoughtful, witty and memorable journal asks us to question absolutely everything we have come to believe about how to live.

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.