Selected Poems of James Merrill

Author  James Merrill Edited by  J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser
Selected Poems of James Merrill

This volume brings together the best of Merrill—and dazzles at every turn. This balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to his work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars.

James Merrill himself once called his body of work “chronicles of love and loss,” and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life—comic and haunting, exotic and domestic—to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. 

Includes poems from the domestic rupture of “The Broken Home” to the universal connections of “Lost in Translation”; from the American storyteller of “The Summer People” to the ecologically motivated satirist of “Self-Portrait in…