{"product_id":"collected-poems-9780375709418","title":"Collected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe publication of James Merrills Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poemsits sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at onceappeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades  Merrills range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book  his urbanity and wit  his intriguing images and paradoxes  shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer  he \"looked for English in its billiard-table sensewords that have been set spinning against their own gravity.\" But beneath their surface glamour  his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles  he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative  this book abounds with what he once called his \"chronicles of love and loss.\" Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him  Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling waysways  indeed  that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago  the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill  \"The time eventually comes  in a good poets career  when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century  your generation  your language  your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets.\"  This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrills privately printed book  The Black Swan  published in 1946  to his posthumous collection  A Scattering of Salts  which appeared in 1995  all of the poems he published are included  except for juvenalia and his epic  The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition  twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire  Montale  and Cavafy  among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.  Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrills workhis novels and plays  and his collected prose. Together  these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.  From the Hardcover edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45651919568949,"sku":"ByrdShop_037570941X","price":50.1,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780375709418.jpg?v=1781845198","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/collected-poems-9780375709418","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}