The Nobel Prize-winning poet's most popular work

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.

"One of America's greatest living poets."-The Washington Post Book World

"Merwin keeps his language simple but his perceptions complex. Classical in their lines of inquiry and restraint yet vital in their attunement to the here and now, these personal odes and musings on daily existence and the cycles of life are, by turns, bemused and exalted . . . each poem infuses the collection with buoyancy and light."-Booklist

Now in paperback, W.S. Merwin's latest masterwork-which reviewers have described as "meditative," "playful," and "lithely beautiful"-guides readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Akin to Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes, every poem in Present Company directly addresses the people and things of daily life, as in "To the Thief at the Airport" or "To Lingering Regrets."

"To This May"

They know so much more now about the heart we are told but the world still seems to come one at a time one day one year one season and here it is spring once more with its birds nesting in the holes in the walls its morning finding the first time its light pretending not to move always beginning as it goes

This is one of the greatest collections of love poetry ever published. Inspired by Pablo Neruda's youthful relationships and injected with an expressive eroticism, these poems are as accomplished as they are evocative and sensual. First published in 1924 to international acclaim when Neruda was just nineteen, this book is still adored the world over for being one of the most memorable, intense and romantic works of poetry ever written. It is a work of poetry to be cherished by lovers old and new. The perfect Valentine's Day present. INTRODUCED BY LEO BOIX 'The poems today remain as urgently gorgeous as freshly picked flowers' Carol Ann Duffy The Vintage Classics Love Poems series brings together some of the most sensual, heart-breaking and romantic poetry ever written. Working in collaboration with Vintage Creative Director Suzanne Dean this edition has been created by Spanish illustrator Jesús Cisneros.

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century - an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. Merwin composed the poems of Garden Time as he was losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated the poems to his wife, Paula. In this gorgeous, mindful and life-affirming book, he channels energy from animated sounds and memories to remind us that 'the only hope is to be the daylight'. This late collection written in his late-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Switching between past and present, he shows us a powerful and moving vision of the eternal, focusing on images of mornings, sunsets, shifting seasons, stars, birds and insects to capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world. In a poem about Li Po, 'now there is only the river / that was always on its own way'. In another poem he dreams that 'the same river is still here / the house is the old house and I am here in the morning / in the sunlight and the same bird is singing'. He remembers when 'dragonflies were as common as sunlight / hovering in their own days' and recalls 'a house that had been left to its own silence / for half a century'. In a poem of wonder entitled 'Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud', he writes: 'I keep looking for what has always been mine / searching for it even as I / think of leaving it.' Poetry Book Society Recommendation

"Metaphors, puns, surrealist visions, converted into sharp, disturbing little narratives . . . only a poet, and a good one, could have written it."-The Atlantic Monthly

W.S. Merwin's acclaimed short prose-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 Saturday Review remarked, they have "astonishing range and power."

The Book of Fables is an affordable paperback of all the short prose from two 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 severe and sensuous.

From "A Garden":

You are a garden into which a bomb once fell and did not explode, during a war that happened before you can remember. It came down at night. It screamed, but there were so many screams. It was heard, but it was forgotten. It buried itself. It was searched for but it was given up. So much else had been buried alive . . .

Poet and translator W.S. Merwin has long been committed to artistic, political, and environmental causes in both word and deed. He has received nearly every major literary accolade, including the 2005 National Book Award in Poetry for Migration. Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palms.

Spain has produced two books that changed world literature: "Don Quixote" and "Lazarillo de Tormes," the first picaresque novel ever written and the inspired precursor to works as various as "Vanity Fair" and "Huckleberry Finn," Banned by the Spanish Inquisition after publication in 1554, Lazarillo was soon translated throughout Europe, where it was widely copied. The book is a favorite to this day for its vigorous colloquial style and the earthy realism with which it exposes human hypocrisy.
The bastard son of a prostitute, Lazarillo goes to work for a blind beggar, who beats and starves him, while teaching him some very useful dirty tricks. The boy then drifts in and out of the service of a succession of masters, each vividly sketched and together revealing the corrupt world of imperial Spain. Its miseries are made all the more apparent by the candor and surprising good cheer with which young Lazarillo recounts his ever more curious fate.
This version of Lazarillo, by the prizewinning poet and translator W.S. Merwin, brings out the wonderful vitality and humor of this universal masterwork.
The author of" Lazarillo de Tormes" is unknown.

First published in 1924, Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada remains among Pablo Neruda's most popular work. Daringly metaphorical and sensuous, this collection juxtaposes youthful passion with the desolation of grief. Drawn from the poet's most intimate and personal associations, the poems combine eroticism and the natural world with the influence of expressionism and the genius of a master poet. This edition features the newly corrected original Spanish text, with masterly English translations by award-winning poet W. S. Merwin on facing pages.Includes twelve sketches by Pablo PicassoNew introduction by Cristina GarciaA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition pacjaged with French flaps

W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century - an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. The Moon Before Morning is a love letter composed in a stunning rush of memory. Answering the call set forth in The Shadow of Sirius (2009), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize, Merwin extends the emotional and intellectual reach of that collection with passionate reverence for the natural world, bittersweet reflection on time's irrevocable ravages, and equanimity informed by a lifetime of writing and practised contemplation. Merwin's studied precision in form and language filters crisp, beautiful images through ethereal memory, forging an intense bond between the writer and a quickly transforming world. 'When we forget,' Merwin writes, others will remember: no action or spirit on Earth is without its infinite reverberations. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Poetry. Asian Studies. This collection furthers Copper Canyon's project of reintroducing Pulitzer Prize winner W.S. Merwin's out-of-print works, drawing together poems from his classic collections Asian Figures, Sun at Midnight, and his two volumes of Selected Translations. Gathered here are translations and versions of poems and aphorisms from Asian languages as varied as Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, Persian, and Vietnamese. The book contains poems from some of the world's greatest writers, including Rumi, Tu Fu, Li Po, and Muso Soseki.

This major collection, by a major American poet who has been awarded the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art, is concerned with the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France. "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."

Antonio Porchia (18861968) wrote one book, a slender collection of poetic aphorisms that became a classic in the Spanish-speaking world. With affinities to Taoist and Buddhist epigrams, Voices bears witness to the awe of human existence. Revised and updated with a new introduction by translator W.S. Merwin, this bilingual volume brings back into print one of Latin America's great literary treasures.

"He who tells the truth says almost nothing.
*
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
*
Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.
*
Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.
*
When I come upon some idea that is not of this world, I feel as though this world had grown wider.
*
This world understands nothing but words, and you have come into it with almost none.
*
We become aware of the void as we fill it."

Antonio Porchia (18861968) was born in Italy. After his father died, he emigrated to Argentina with his mother and seven siblings, and as the eldest child, started working at the age of 14. He was self-taught, and his only book, "Voices," caught the attention of a noted French critic who assumed him to be a scholar of Kafka and Buddhism, rather than the humble man who loved to tend his garden. Today, Porchia's aphorisms are published in more than a dozen Spanish-language editions as well as in German, French and Italian.

W.S. Merwin's awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. He is the author of dozens of books of poetry and translations. He lives in Hawaii.

Throughout WWII, French poet Jean Follain wrote poems that revisit the provinces of personal and cultural history. His quietly phrased, brief devotions are -described as "miniatures," yet are monumental, capturing the pressure of history upon daily moments. By reducing the world to its small objects, every detail, every image becomes imbued with meaning.

This bilingual volume, celebrating the centennial of Jean Follain's birth, is translated by W.S. Merwin, who writes in his introduction: "Follain's concern is finally with the mystery of the present--the mystery which gives the recalled concrete details their form, at once luminous and removed, when they are seen at last in their places, as they seem to be in the best of his poems."

These never-before published translations of "Blood Wedding" and "Yerma" unite two of Federico Garcia Lorca's most passionate masterpieces with two of America's most gifted poets, Langston Hughes and W.S. Merwin.

Sir Gawain & the Green Knight is a classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure and romance. This splendid new translation - by one of the world's leading poets - has already been acclaimed in America. The original poem and W.S. Merwin's modern version are comparable in stature and imaginative power to another medieval epic, Beowulf, in Seamus Heaney's rendering. All Camelot is merry with Christmas revelry when an enormous green-skinned knight with brilliant green clothes rides into King Arthur's court. This giant throws down a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever delivers the fatal blade must promise to take the same in a year and a day. When the young Gawain beheads him, the Green Knight grabs hold of his severed head and makes off on horseback. The poem follows Gawain's adventures thereafter - shockingly brutal hunts, an almost impossible seduction, and terrifyingly powerful adversaries - as he gallantly struggles to honour his promise. Capturing the pace, impact and richly alliterative language of the original Middle English text - presented on facing pages - Merwin brings a new immediacy to a spellbinding, timeless narrative written many centuries ago by a master poet whose identity has been lost to time. Modern and Middle English parallel text edition.

Title: Walden; or Life in the Woods.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The GENERAL HISTORICAL collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. This varied collection includes material that gives readers a 19th century view of the world. Topics include health, education, economics, agriculture, environment, technology, culture, politics, labour and industry, mining, penal policy, and social order. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Thoreau, Henry David; 1854. 8 . 10410.aaa.32.

In The Lost Upland, W. S. Merwin vividly conveys his intimate knowledge of the people and the countryside in this ancient part of France (home of the Lascaux caves). In three narratives of small-town life, Merwin shows with matchless poetic and narrative power how the past is still palpably present. On its original publication in 1992 Jane Kramer wrote, "These stories are a gift from one of the great poets of the English language, a chronicle of the heart-stopping seasons of one small corner of La France Profonde and of its stubborn and illusive characters. Merwin's French peasants are a force of nature, like the blackberry brambles that used to choke his garden, and he cultivates them both with that attentive, exacting, and relentlessly patient genius that great poets and great gardeners share. This is, simply, the most beautiful writing about France I know."

W. S. Merwin is widely acknowledged as one of the finest living poets in English. Less well known is the power and range of his work in prose. For his first new prose collection in more than ten years, The Ends of the Earth, Merwin has gathered eight essays that show the breadth of his imagination and sympathy. A memoir of George Kirstein, publisher of "The Nation," stands alongside one of Sydney Parkinson, explorer, naturalist and artist on Captain James Cook's Endeavour. A wonderful portrait of the French explorer of Hawai'i, Jean-Francois Galaup de La Perouse is followed by a visit to the Neanderthal skeleton of Boffia Bonneval. There are treks through the Hawaiian forests, to the Holy Mountain of Athos, and with the butterflies in Mexico. For this magical and wondrous journey we have as our guide the excited and concise poet-naturalist, writing at the top of his form.

"An undisputed master."--"The New York Times"

Long out of print, this reissue is the first translation into English of the work of Muso Soseki, the thirteenth-century Zen roshi and founder of the rock garden. A gorgeous introduction by co-translator W.S. Merwin sets the stage for 130 poems and six letters to the Emperor that combine delicacy and lightness with penetrating plainness. Essential for poets, gardeners, and students of Zen.

Toki-no-Ge (Satori Poem)

"Year after year
I dug in the earth
looking for the blue of heaven
only to feel
the pile of dirt
choking me
until once in the dead of night
I tripped on a broken brick
and kicked it into the air
and saw that without a thought
I had smashed the bones
of the empty sky"

Born ten years after Dante Alighieric, Muso Soseki was the most famous Zen monk of his time, and is considered the father of the rock garden. Muso spent much of his early life practicing Zen in remote temples and hermitages. In spite of this isolation, his reputation grew, and he served as an advisor and teacher to several emperors, as well as to more than thirteen thousand students.

W.S. Merwin is one of the world's foremost translators of poetry.

Co-translator Soiku Shigematsu is a Zen scholar, poet, and translator who serves as the abbot of Shogen-ji Temple in Shimizu, Japan.

In this conservation classic, originally published fifty-five years ago, Fred Bodsworth tells the story of a solitary Eskimo curlew's perilous migration and search for a mate. The lone survivor comes to stand for the entirety of a species on the brink of extinction, and for all in nature that is endangered. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and an afterword by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

With "Lament for the Makers" W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet.
Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included.
"Lament for the Makers" connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.