W.S. Merwin

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for PoetryFeatured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS.Honored as one of the "Best Books of the Year" from Publishers Weekly."A collection of luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory." —Pulitzer Prize Committee"In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of creations, an accomplished style." —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books“Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review"[The Shadow of Sirius is] the very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy." —Harold Bloom"[Merwin's] best book in a decade—and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence." —Orion"[The Shadow of Sirius] shows the earthly possibilities of simple completeness in a writer's mature work. More than an achievement in poetry, this is an achievement in writing." —Harvard ReviewThe nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin’s new book of poems. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound—the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” In “Photographer,” Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by “someone who understood.” In “Empty Lot,” Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?somewhere the Perseids are fallingtoward us already at a speed that wouldburn us alive if we could believe itbut in the stillness after the rain endsnothing is to be heard but the drops fallingW.S. Merwin, author of over fifty books, is America’s foremost poet. His last two books were honored with major literary awards: Migration won the National Book Award, and Present Company received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.

Winner of the National Book AwardA New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year"A powerful case can be made for declaring W.S. Merwin the most influential American poet of the last half-century. Migration: New & Selected Poems is that case.As an undergraduate at Princeton, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to “get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day.” Over the last 50 years, Merwin’s muse led him beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engaged a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of W.S. Merwin’s work, “I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.”The definitive volume from “one of America’s greatest living poets.”—The Washington Post Book World"The poems in Migration speak from a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection."—Citation from the National Book Award judges"The publication of W. S. Merwin’s selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world... Merwin is one of the great poets of our age."—Los Angeles Times Book Review"[I]t's hard to believe this rich selection represents the work of just one man."—Publishers Weekly"[In] any landscape, Merwin stands tall."—Philadelphia Inquirer"Complex, spiritual, and evocative, Merwin is a major poet, and this is a sublime measure of his achievements."—ALA Booklist"Migration: New and Selected Poems gathers Merwin’s personal harvest of his fifty-year oeuvre into one magisterial volume."—The Wichita Eagle"Many of us have followed W.S. Merwin’s work book by book, collection by collection.…He has created a body of wisdom literature that is unprecedented in our age. I feel lucky to be alive at a time when W.S. Merwin has been creating his startling and incomparable work."—Edward Hirsch, introduction to “A Tribute to W.S. Merwin”"The trajectory of Merwin’s work is meteoric: its greatest flashes of beauty and insight are the product of traditional poetic impulses breaking up under the pressures of our atmosphere... he has written some of the most powerful poems in the language against our species’ murderous sense of self-importance."—Jacket"W. S. Merwin's legacy is unquestionably secure: his best and most fierce poems are moody, visionary compositions that dive into the unconscious and the seeds of existence with an inwardness and scrutiny unique in American poetry."—PoetryFrom Once in SpringA sentence continues after thirty years it wakes in the silence of the same room the words that come to it after the long comma existed all that time wandering in space as points of light travel unseen through ages of which they alone are the measure and arrive at last to tell of something that came to pass before they ever began or meant anythingPoet and translator W.S. Merwin has received nearly every major literary accolade, including the Pulitzer Prize, Tanning Prize and Bollingen Prize. He has long been committed to artistic, political and environmental causes in both word and deed; when presented with the Pulitzer Prize, he donated the prize money to artists and the draft resistance. He currently lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palm trees.

A volume of poems concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and with history and how the world endures it—f rom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch).A literary event—a new volume of poems by one of the masters of modern poetry— The Rain in the Trees is W. S. Merwin's first book since the publication of his Opening the Hand.Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem—so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently) Opening the Hand, he has produced a body of work of great profundity and power made from the simplest and most beautiful poetic speech.Merwin can now rightfully be called a master, and this book shows in every way why this is the case.

“Merwin’s masterfully refined, meditative poems stem from his dwelling mindfully in one beloved place and handling words as though they are seeds, flowers, stones, and water… Merwin has attained a transcendent and transformative elevation of beaming perception, exquisite balance, and clarifying beauty.”— Booklist, starred review of The Moon before Morning "In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page."—Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books "W.S. Merwin's legacy is unquestionably his best and most fierce poems are moody, visionary compositions that dive into the unconscious and the seeds of existence with an inwardness and scrutiny unique in American poetry."— Poetry "Merwin [is] fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom."— Publishers Weekly , starred review An elaboration and response to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shadow of Sirius , W.S. Merwin examines everything from minute flowers to oceanic destruction, and weaves our complex relationship with the natural world with his own youth, memory, and intense engagement with the passing of days. With considered reverence, subtle might, and generous poetic imagination, Merwin presents a masterful and gorgeous collection. From "Wild Oats": All the beads have gonefrom the old stringand the string does not miss them I needed my mistakesin their own orderto get me here In my youth I believed in somewhere elseI put faith in travelnow I am becoming my own tree W.S. Merwin is one of the country's best-selling poets. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States, and his three most recent poetry collections each received a major award, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress. He lives in Hawaii.

"There are few great poets alive at any one time, and W.S. Merwin is one of them. Read him." —The Guardian"Merwin has attained a transcendent and transformative elevation of beaming perception, exquisite balance, and clarifying beauty." —Booklist, starred review of The Moon before Morning "Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page." —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of BooksW.S. Merwin composed Garden Time during the difficult process of losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated his new poems to his wife, Paula. In this gorgeous, mindful, and life-affirming book, our greatest poet channels energy from animated sounds and memories to remind us that "the only hope is to be the daylight."From "A Breath of Day":Last night I slept on the floor of the sea in an unsounded part of the oceanin the morning it was a long way upthrough the dark streets of a silent countrywith no language in its empty housesuntil I had almost reached the surfaceof a morning that I had never seenthen a breeze came to it and I beganto remember the voices of young leaves . . .W.S. Merwin served as Poet Laureate of the United States and has received every major literary accolade, including two Pulitzer prizes, most recently for The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon), and the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon). He lives in Hawaii.

This Fiftieth Anniversary edition celebrates one of the most ground-breaking books in American poetry. When first published in 1967, W.S. Merwin’s The Lice was ground-breaking. Its visionary urgency directly engaged the nexus of aesthetics and morality, exerting an immediate and lasting effect on the writing and reading of poetry. Like all great art, this monumental work continues to inspire.As Merwin discussed in an interview, “The Lice was written at a time when I really felt there was no point in writing. I got to the point where I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me. I would be out growing vegetables and walking around the countryside when all of a sudden I’d find myself writing a poem, and I’d write it.”When the War is OverWhen the war is overWe will be proud of course the air will beGood for breathing at lastThe water will have been improved the salmonAnd the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectlyThe dead will think the living are worth it we will knowWho we areAnd we will all enlist again

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca, and has translated from French, Spanish, Latin and Portugese. He has published more than a dozen volumes of orignal poetry and several volumes of prose. Mr. Merwin has been awarded the Tanning Prize, the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Pen Translation Prize, and many other honors. He lives in Haiku, Hawaii.W.S. Merwin's Second Four Books of Poems includes some of the most startlingly original and influential poetry of the second half of this century, a poetry that has moved, as Richard Howard has written, "from preterition to presence to prophecy."Other books by M.S. Merwin available from Consortium:East Window (Copper Canyon Press), 1-55659-091-1The First Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon Press), 1-55659-139-XFlower & Hand (Copper Canyon Press), 1-55659-119-5

“Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of all creations, an accomplished style.”—Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books“It is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, by a poet who is capable of so much change.”—The NationEssential means just that: A deeply considered selection from W.S. Merwin’s vast oeuvre that represents the poems—and a few select pieces of prose—that readers will cherish today, tomorrow, and into the next century. This incisive, slender collection draws only the best of the best from the work Merwin published over his sixty-year writing career. A teeming, resonate, exuberant testament of a rare, revolutionary, and deeply rewarding poet.And what better way to honor those thousands of poems that are not in The Essential by highlighting an aphoristic poem that is:SeparationYour absence has gone through meLike thread through a needle.Everything I do is stitched with its color.Since launching his career by winning the Yale Younger Poets Award 1952, W.S. Merwin has written and translated sixty books of poetry and prose and won every major literary prize this country has to offer. He lives in Hawaii, within the palm forest where he wrote, “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.”

Merwin, W.S. The Carrier of Ladders. Poems. Fifth printing. New York, Atheneum, 1976. 13,5 cm x 22,5 cm. IX, 138 pages. Original Softcover. Very good condition with some minor signs of external wear. From the library of swiss - american - irish poet Chuck Kruger. With his name to front free endpaper. Contains among others the following Plane; Teachers; The Owl; The Different Stars; The Dead Hive; The Mountains; The Bridges; The Hands; Do Not Die; Words From a Totem Animal; Animula; Quine; The Judgement of Paris; Edouard; Not These Hills; The Piper; The Lake; The Church; A Calm in April; The Birds on the Morning of Going etc.

Half RoundelI make no prayer For the spoilt season, The weed of Eden. I make no prayer. Save us the green In the weed of time.Now is November; In night uneasy Nothing I say. I make no prayer. Save us from the water That washes us away.What do I ponder? All smiled disguise, Lights in cold places, I make no prayer. Save us from air That wears us loosely.The leaf of summer To cold has come In little time. I make no prayer. From earth deliver And the dark therein.Now is no whisper Through all the living. I speak to nothing. I make no prayer. Save us from fire Consuming up and down.Evening with Lee Shore and CliffsSea-shimmer, faint haze, and far out a bird Dipping for flies or fish. Then, when over That wide silk suddenly the shadow Spread skating, who turned with a shiver High in the rocks? And knew, then only, the waves' Layering patience: how they would follow after, After, dogged as sleep, to his inland Dreams, oh beyond the one lamb that cried In the olives, past the pines' derision. And heard Behind him not the sea's gaiety but its laughter.The FishermenWhen you think how big their feet are in black rubber And it slippery underfoot always, it is clever How they thread and manage among the sprawled nets, lines, Hooks, spidery cages with small entrances. But they are used to it. We do not know their names. They know our needs, and live by them, lending them wiles And beguilements we could never have fashioned for them; They carry the ends of our hungers out to drop them To wait swaying in a dark place we could never have chosen. By motions we have never learned they feed us. We lay wreaths on the sea when it has drowned them.

“The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and underground.”—The Atlantic Monthly“W.S. Merwin is our strongest poet.”—The New York Times Review of BooksIn this new masterwork from one of America’s foremost poets, W.S. Merwin guides his readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Akin to 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 goesThese poems to the world are playful, deadly serious, and full of wonder. Whether writing of an unused vehicle in “To Zbigniew Herbert’s Bicycle” or watching fireworks from a distance in “To the Coming Winter,” Merwin’s poems create a rare and compelling intimacy. There is no one writing today like W.S. Merwin.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 Pulitzer, Tanning, Lannan, and Bollingen prizes. His most recent award is the International Golden Wreath from the Struga Foundation, a longstanding literary honor that, in its 70-year history, has been offered to only three English-speaking poets. W.S. Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palms.

A remarkable volume of poems about the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France—f rom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch).“One of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry" ( The New Yorker ) and winner of the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art delivers a major collection.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch) comes a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii.Here is the story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers.A brilliant capturing—inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands—of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through the exploitative incursions of Europeans and Americans. An epic narrative that enthralls with the grandeur of its language and of its vision.

Brings back into print all the poems from The Compass Flower (1977), Feathers from the Hill (1981), and Opening the Hand (1983).

Brief essays examine identity, consciousness, and our interaction with the world

America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. “Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation,” writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. Summer Doorways captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, A Mask for Janus—the moment was, as the author writes, “an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.”

W.S. Merwin, one of the great contemporary English-language poets, turns to prose here in a brilliantly evocative re-creation of a distant past?as well as an exquisite rendering of his own romance with an abandoned farmhouse in the magical countryside of Southwest France. The Mays of Tales from Southwest France illuminates the origins of the famous 12th-century Provencal troubadours, beginning with the great Bernart de Ventadorn whose work Merwin first encountered as a young translator of the archaic language known as Old Occitan. The timeless beauty of the troubadours? pastoral songs and narrative poems has enabled them to survive for 900 years, far outlasting the language from which they sprang. As he reveals the lyrical pleasures in Southwest France?s medieval courts, Merwin also acquaints readers with the ruins of the chateau of Ventadorn, Bernart?s home, as well as the elegantly careworn farmhouse that the poet himself has owned for decades. Merwin brings a sense of historical continuity to his narrative as he writes of how the warm enchantments that distinguish the farmhouse, the local patois, and the area?s rural traditions are in many respects the direct progeny of the troubadours? storied culture and language of old.

Love poems and vividly sensuous poems about the city, the material world, and their transformations are included in a verse collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch) delivers “one of the most beautiful and moving collections of poetry of his career … a book of deep historical resonance and luminous poetic grace” ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). “With each new book we have been reminded why, for forty years, he has remained a pivotal figure in the literary life of this country … [he] continues to earn his place as one of our most influential and compelling contemporary poets.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

W.S. Merwin is 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. While he has long been viewed in the States as an essential voice in modern American literature, his poetry has been unavailable in Britain for over 35 years. This new selection covers over five decades of his poetry, from "The Dancing Bears" (1954) to "Present Company" (2005). Most of the book is drawn from his major American retrospective, "Migration", winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry. Merwin's poetry has moved beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of his work: "I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn't take so much from it into my own life." His recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. Merwin is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world.

This is the seventh printing of the edition first published in 1963.

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 heartstopping 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."

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch) comes a masterly work of poems, exhibiting the artistry and style he made his own.A strikingly beautiful book of poems from one of our finest poets. To his lyrics Merwin adds three long narrative "Lament for the Makers" is his tribute to fellow poets who are gone and who had his admiration, from Dylan Thomas to James Merrill; "Testimony" is a tour de force, an autobiographical poem in the manner of Francois Villon; "Suite in the Key of Forgetting" is a remarkable poem about memory and memories.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch) comes a volume of astonishing range and extraordinary a major literary event that captures the spiritual anguish of our time. 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. 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 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 ... we knowfrom the beginning that the darknessis beyond us there is no explainingthe dark it is only the lightthat 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.

There’s no mystery to chopping down a tree. But how do you put back together a tree that’s been felled? Mystical instructions are required, and that’s what W. S. Merwin provides in his prose piece “Unchopping a Tree,” appearing for the first time in a self-contained volume. Written with a poet’s grace, an ecologist’s insights, and a Buddhist’s reverence for life, this elegant work describes the difficult, sacred job of reconstructing a tree. Step by step, page by page, with Merwin’s humble authority, secrets are revealed, and the destroyed tree rises from the forest floor. Unchopping a Tree opens with simplicity and “Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nest that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places.” W. S. Merwin, like many conservationists, is quick to “When we destroy the so-called natural world around us we’re simply destroying ourselves. And I think it’s irreversible.” Thus the tree takes on a scale that begs the reader’s compassion, and one tree is a parable for the restoration of all nature.

Poems present the author's observations on the natural world, love, and his experiences and feelings

Oracular and elegant, W. S. Merwin’s poetry reveals a heightened sense of what is essential to human the fragile framing of nature, the mysteries of memory and perception, the inescapable fact of our mortality. In a career spanning seven decades— from his brilliant emergence as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize in 1952 to his recent term as U.S. Poet Laureate—he has fashioned a poetics unmistakably his own, marked by a stripped-down, unpunctuated style that foregrounds his responsiveness, spiritual insights, and facility with unadorned, elemental language. Now, with this two-volume edition, Merwin becomes only the second living poet to have his work collected by The Library of America. Here are such landmark books as his debut volume A Mask for Janus (1952), which shows the young poet engaged in a fruitful dialogue with Auden and Berryman; The Lice (1967), with its impassioned political poems about the Vietnam War and ecological catastrophe; The Vixen (1996), which offers vivid recollections of southwestern France; the epic verse novel The Folding Cliffs (2008), set in nineteenth-century Hawaii; and The Shadow of Sirius (2008), with its “late poems / that are made of words / that have come the whole way / they have been there.”LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A concern for mankind's survival pervades nearly one hundred poems commenting on the fears and loneliness of human existence

A collection centered in myth, A Mask for Janus is the 49th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets While Merwin’s poetry as a whole is grounded in the poetic forms of many eras and societies, this first collection is inspired by classical models. Writing in American Poetry Review, Vernon Young traces the poems to “Biblical tales, Classical myth, love songs from the Age of Chivalry, Renaissance retellings; they comprise carols, roundels, odes, ballads, sestinas, and they contrive golden equivalents of emblematic models: the masque, the Zodiac, the Dance of Death.”

Gathered in this volume are translations and versions of poems and aphorisms from Asian languages as varied as Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, Persian, and Vietnamese. Included are poems by some of the world's greatest writers, deeply influential poets such as Rumi, Tu Fu, Li Po, and Muso Soseki, beautifully brought forward by one of the century's most celebrated poets.