The Pupil

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The Pupil (REPRINT) Pub. Date: 10/15/2002 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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The Pupil (1ST) Pub. Date: 10/30/2001 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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Overview

Hailed by Peter Davison in the Boston Sunday Globe as a poet who “engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match,” W. S. Merwin now gives us The Pupil, a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary beauty: a major literary event.

These are poems of great lyrical intensity, concerned with darkness and light, with the seasons, and with the passing of time across landscapes that are both vast and minutely imagined. They capture the spiritual anguish of our time; the bittersweet joys of vanishing wilderness; anger at our political wrong- doings; the sensuality that memory can engender. Here are remembrances of the poet’s youth, lyrics on the loss of loved ones, echoes from the surfaces of the natural world. Here, too, is the poet’s sense of a larger mystery:

. . . we know from the beginning that the darkness is beyond us there is no explaining the dark it is only the light that we keep feeling a need to account for
—from “The Marfa Lights”

Passionate, rigorous, and quietly profound, The Pupil is an essential addition to the canon of contemporary American poetry—a book that finds W. S. Merwin’s singularly resonant voice at the height of its power.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Fresh from several much-praised book-length works, the impressively prolific Merwin (The Folding Cliffs, etc.) enters his sixth decade as a publishing poet with a decidedly mixed group of new short poems. Recent collections have portrayed the sights and sounds of Hawaii, Merwin's adopted home state, along with memories of his Atlantic coast boyhood. Though both are represented here, they take a backseat to astronomy and the night sky, which occasion many reflections on mortality, transience and the void, delivered in Merwin's familiar, sinuous, punctuation-free sentences. One poem remembers "the year of the well of darkness/ overflowing with no/ moon and no stars"; others portray "the darkness thinking the light" or "the white moments that had traveled so long." Merwin's overreliance on a few key words threatens monotony for the astronomy-centered first half of the book. The poems shine when Merwin finds subjects more specific and concrete than time, space, darkness and light. "Aliens" describes the beauty in a flock of linnets; "Before the Flood" portrays the poet's father as Noah. "Plan for the Death of Ted Hughes" becomes a genuinely original, understated elegy. And the poems near the back of the book are the best Merwin has done for many years among them a meditation on liberal guilt, a strong dawn piece ("the teeth of roofs and the thin trees") and a bitter poem about Matthew Shepard: "This is what the west was won for/ and this is the way it was won." (Oct.) Forecast: Merwin has won about every award there is (Pulitzer, Bollingen, and so on). He has appeared frequently this year in the New Yorker, and his role as ecological advocate has recently raised his profile. All these factorsmay help boost his new work; the sheer number of recent books, however, risks creating a Merwin glut. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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From The Critics

A member of the awe-inspiring generation of American poets born in the 1920s others include John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, and Allen Ginsberg Merwin remains a prolific author of award-winning poetry, prose, and translation, as well as an environmental activist, pacifist, and practicing Buddhist. Known for their elegance and, in later periods, lack of punctuation, his poems include many sonnets and are apt to use soft, echoing rhyme. Lovely to hear, they have their own life on the page, where the tension between syntax and enjambment provides narrative thrust: "the searchlight rays/ groping up through the smoke St. Paul's was still/ untouched though waves of bombs went on falling/ I kept seeing Alice rollerskating." This new collection moves in a seasonal progression from spring to winter, covering old and new territory: a difficult clergyman father, a friendship with Ted Hughes, the murder of Matthew Shepard, the horrific practice of bear-baiting in Pakistan, and more recent friendships in Maui, his adopted home. Light is played against darkness as a central metaphor for existence, and there are poems about stars, comets, and the Marfa lights in Texas, the last an unexplained natural phenomenon representing centuries of human confrontation with the unknown. There is no poet quite like Merwin for portraying human failure in all its poignant irony. For all poetry collections. Ellen Kaufman Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375709647
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/15/2002
Edition description: REPRINT
Pages: 112
Series: Knopf Poetry Series
Product dimensions: 6.13 (w) x 9.31 (h) x 0.31 (d)

Meet the Author

W. S. Merwin has been awarded most of the major prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry. He and his wife live on Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.

Read an Excerpt

Prophecy

At the end of the year the stars go out the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings first she sings of the darkness she can see she sings on until she comes to the age without time and the dark she cannot see

no one hears then as she goes on singing of all the white days that were brought to us one by one that turned to colors around us

a light coming from far out in the eye where it begins before she can see it

burns through the words that no one has believed

The Comet Museum

So the feeling comes afterward some of it may reach us only long afterward when the moment itself is beyond reckoning

beyond time beyond memory as though it were not moving in heaven neither burning farther through any past nor ever to arrive again in time to be when it has gone the senses wake

all through the day they wait for it here are pictures that someone took of what escaped us at the time only now can we remember

	Prophecy	3
	The Comet Museum	4
	Sonnet	5
	The Time of Shadow	6
	The Hours of Darkness	7
	Flights in the Dark	10
	The Marfa Lights	11
	Migrants by Night	14
	In the Open	16
	Overtone	19
	Fires in Childhood	20
	Glassy Sea	21
	The Moment	22
	Any Time	23
	Far Company	24
	Aliens	25
	Mid-Air Mirror	26
	A Term	27
	Unspoken Greeting	28
	The Open Land	29
	Before the Flood	30
	A Calling	31
	Remembering the Signs	32
	Lit in Passing	33
	At Night Before Spring	34
	One Night in April	35
	Unknown Bird	36
	Daylight	38
	Worn	39
	Downstream	40
	Before the May Fair	41
	Once in Spring	42
	The Veil of May	43
	The Youth of Animals	44
	The Hollow in the Stone	45
	Late Song	46
	The Source	47
	First Sight	49
	First of June	50
	Unseen Touch	51
	The Summer	52
	The Black Virgin	53
	To the Spiders of This Room	54
	Above the Long Field	55
	Under the Day	56
	Simon's Vision	57
	Wings	58
	A Morning in Autumn	59
	The Night Plums	60
	In the Old Vineyard	61
	Just Now	62
	To a Friend Who Keeps Telling Me That He Has Lost His Memory	63
	Planh for the Death of Ted Hughes	64
	A Collection	65
	A Death in the Desert	66
	Calling Late	67
	One of the Laws	68
	Star	69
	Feast Day	71
	Good People	72
	The Fence	73
	The Sleeper	74
	In Time	75
	Through a Glass	76
	Before Morning	77
	Earlier	79
	Memorandum	80
	To Echo	81
	The Wild	82
	Transit	83
	Usage	84
	Home Tundra	85
	Monologue	86
	The Name of the Air	87
	To Maoli as the Year Ends	88
	The Flight of Language	89
	Heights	90
	This January	91

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The Pupil

Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

From The Critics

Product Details

Meet the Author

Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents