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Centred around three journeys to Mount Athos, one of the most
important places in Orthodox Christianity, this is both a
beautifully nuanced travel book and a journey of self-discovery in
a world beset by violence and fear. Mount Athos is the spiritual
home of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and for more than ten
centuries this monastic community in northern Greece has been a
centre for contemplative life, a staging ground for mystical
visions and teachings, and a watch tower for Byzantium. A world
unto itself, which has existed almost unchanged since medieval
times, the theocratic state of Athos is a spiritual haven which
stands in dramatic counterpoint to the contemporary world. Even
time is calculated differently here -- Athos rejects the Julian
calendar and clocks are reset every day to Byzantine time --
midnight falls at sunset. Christopher Merrill travelled to Mount
Athos in search of spiritual renewal and a vision of eternity. At
this unique intersection of modernity and Biblical tradition he
discovered not only the enduring value of faith but also how much
Athos has to teach us about the contemplative life, and found that
eternity is located in the here and now. Journey to the Holy
Mountain is a book rooted in spiritual crisis, which explores a
route to salvation hitherto undocumented in a mainstream Western
context. Out of spiritual desolation Merrill came to a deepening
sense of the religious life, learning to recognize what have been
described as 'the distinctive challenges and calls' of each
monastic hour. The world of Mount Athos is closely guarded against
intrusion by monk-policemen: no women, or even female animals, are
allowed on Athos and the number of visitors is severely restricted.
Christopher Merill describes, in vivid scenes and stories, the
daily life ritual and scenery of a place which most will never be
able to visit.
What is a flash fiction called in other countries? In Latin America
it is a micro, in Denmark kortprosa, in Bulgaria mikro razkaz.
These short shorts, usually no more than 750 words, range from
linear narratives to the more unusual: stories based on
mathematical forms, a paragraph-length novel, a scientific report
on volcanic fireflies that proliferate in nightclubs. Flash has
always and everywhere been a form of experiment, of possibility. A
new entry in the lauded Flash and Sudden Fiction anthologies, this
collection includes 83 of the most beautiful, provocative, and
moving narratives by authors from six continents, including
best-selling writer Etgar Keret, Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah,
Korean screenwriter Kim Young-ha, Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw
Milosz, and Argentinian Queen of the Microstory Ana Maria Shua,
among many others. These brilliantly chosen stories challenge
readers to widen their vision and celebrate both the local and the
universal."
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Necessities (Paperback)
Christopher Merrill
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R362
R325
Discovery Miles 3 250
Save R37 (10%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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"Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished
poets of an extraordinary rich generation. His range of sympathy,
subject, and tone has always been prodigious."--W. S. Merwin
"Necessities" is a meditation on the deepest promptings of the
spirit that could be discovered through language. Influenced by his
reading of Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw
Milosz, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other explorers of the
marvelous, these poems are parables, which deepen with each
reading.
Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry,
more than a dozen edited volumes and books of translations, and
five works of nonfiction. He is the director of the International
Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
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The Psalms of David (Hardcover)
Donald Sheehan; Edited by Xenia Sheehan; Foreword by Christopher Merrill
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R1,207
R956
Discovery Miles 9 560
Save R251 (21%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars is a chronicle
of poet and critic Christopher Merrill's ten war-time journeys to
the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. At once a travelogue,
a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under
siege, this beautifully written and personal narrative takes the
reader along on the author's journeys to all the provinces and
republics of the former Yugoslavia Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,
Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina as
well as to Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and
Turkey. His journeys provide the narrative structure for an
exploration of the roles and responsibility of intellectuals caught
up in a decisive historical moment, many of whom either helped to
incite the war or else bore eloquent witness to its carnage. What
separates this book-the first non-native literary work on the
conflict-from other collections of reportage, political analysis,
and polemic, is its concern for capturing the texture of particular
places in the midst of dramatic change-the sounds and sights and
smells, the stories and observations of victim and perpetrator
alike, the culture of war. Here is a literary meditation on war, a
fascinating portrait of the poetry, politics and the people of the
Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and
future of those war-torn lands. Hear an interview with the author
on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered, February 20th, 'Balkan
Poets.'"
Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars is a chronicle
of poet and critic Christopher Merrill's ten war-time journeys to
the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. At once a travelogue,
a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under
siege, this beautifully written and personal narrative takes the
reader along on the author's journeys to all the provinces and
republics of the former Yugoslavia--Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,
Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina--as
well as to Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and
Turkey. His journeys provide the narrative structure for an
exploration of the roles and responsibility of intellectuals caught
up in a decisive historical moment, many of whom either helped to
incite the war or else bore eloquent witness to its carnage. What
separates this book-the first non-native literary work on the
conflict-from other collections of reportage, political analysis,
and polemic, is its concern for capturing the texture of particular
places in the midst of dramatic change-the sounds and sights and
smells, the stories and observations of victim and perpetrator
alike, the culture of war. Here is a literary meditation on war, a
fascinating portrait of the poetry, politics and the people of the
Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and
future of those war-torn lands. Hear an interview with the author
on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered, February 20th, "Balkan
Poets."
This book offers the most comprehensive and detailed reading to
date of Song of Myself. One of the most distinguished critics in
Whitman studies, Ed Folsom, and one of the nation's most prominent
writers and literary figures, Christopher Merrill, carry on a
dialog with Whitman, and with each other, section by section, as
they invite readers to enter into the conversation about how the
poem develops, moves, improvises, and surprises. Instead of picking
and choosing particular passages to support a reading of the poem,
Folsom and Merrill take Whitman at his word and interact with
"every atom" of his work. The book presents Whitman's final version
of the poem, arranged in fifty-two sections; each section is
followed by Folsom's detailed critical examination of the passage,
and then Merrill offers a poet's perspective, suggesting broader
contexts for thinking about both the passage in question and the
entire poem.
This staggering volume by a leading poet of Eastern Europe,
acclaimed both at home and abroad, includes the entirety of
Debeljak's two most recent collections, Unended and Under the
Waterline (available for the first time in English) and selections
from his groundbreaking earlier work.
This book is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Walt
Whitman's Civil War poetry and prose with a full commentary on each
work. Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill carry on a dialogue with
Whitman (and with each other) as they invite readers to trace how
Whitman's writing about the Civil War develops, shifts, and
manifests itself in different genres throughout the years of the
war. The book offers forty selections of Whitman's war writings,
including not only the well-known war poems but also his prose and
personal letters. Each are followed by Folsom's critical
examination and then by Merrill's afterword, suggesting broader
contexts for thinking about the selection. The real democratic
reader, Whitman said, 'must himself or herself construct indeed the
poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay-the text furnishing the
hints, the clue, the start or frame-work,' because what is needed
for democracy to flourish is 'a nation of supple and athletic
minds.' Folsom and Merrill model this kind of active reading and
encourage both seasoned and new readers of Whitman's war writings
to enter into the challenging and exhilarating mode of talking back
to Whitman, arguing with him, and learning from him.
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Battle of Kosovo (Paperback)
John Matthias, Vladeta Vuckovic; Afterword by Christopher Merrill; Preface by Charles Simic
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R429
Discovery Miles 4 290
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The "Battle of Kosovo" cycle of heroic ballads is generally
considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating
the Serbian Empire's defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late
fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for
centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections
of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karasdzic, the brilliance
of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was
affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe,
Jacob Brimm, Adam Mickiewicz, and Alexander Pushkin. Although
translations into English have been attempted before, few of them,
as Charles Simic notes in his preface, have been persuasive until
now. Simic compares the movement of the verse in these translations
to the "variable foot" effect of William Carlos Williams's later
poetry, and argues that John Matthias "grasps the poetic strategies
of the anonymous Serbian poet as well as Pound did those of Chinese
poetry."
First published in 1987, the translation of the "Battle of Kosovo"
is now reprinted both because of its intrinsic merits and because
the recent crisis in Kosovo itself compels the entire world to
understand the nature of the ancient conflicts and passions that
fuel it. Although Matthias and Simic have elected to retain their
original preface and introduction, Christopher Merrill, a scholar
of the region and author of Only the Nails Remain, has contributed
a brief afterword explaining the importance of this poetry in the
context of NATO's first military action ever against a sovereign
nation.
"In common things are greater extensions of ourselves than we ever
conceived of."
"Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely
consult," observes John Hay, naturalist, essayist, sage, and
inveterate walker of byways. This collection from the 50-year long
career of America's preeminent nature writer illustrates the full
range of Hay's work. An elegant and lyrical stylist, he is, in
Merrill's words, "the nature writer's writer, an illustrator of the
Emersonian notion that 'the world is emblematic.'"
And so Hay reveals the ubiquitous but often unnoticed emblems all
around us. The mad, impossible rush of alewives flinging themselves
upstream to mate, for example, represents "the drive to be, a
common and terrible sending out, to which men are also bound in
helplessness." In the migratory movements of the terns and the
green turtles past his beloved Cape Cod Hay sees the mystery and
magnificence of homing: "To know your direction and return through
outer signs, is as new as it is ancient. We are still people of the
planet, with all its original directions waiting in our being."
Whether describing the rugosa or bayberry of a sand dune, the
plight of stranded pilot whales, or a spider swinging on its
gossamer, Hay encourages us to enlarge our inner universe by
observing, appreciating, and preserving the outer one we so often
ignore. As a result, he says, "we may find that we are being led
onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us," and by
recognizing our "deep alliance with natural forces we find a new
depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living
things."
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