Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology

by W. S. Merwin (Compiler)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582437323
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

W. S. Merwin is one of our most distinguished poets and translators and is the acting United States Poet Laureate. A two–time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he has also been honored with the Bollingen Prize and a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. In 1995 he received the first Dorothea Tanning Prize. He lives and works in Hawaii.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Lament for the Makers

“A . . . rich anthology of poems by 20th–century practitioners who influenced Merwin.” —Publishers Weekly

“ . . . an elegant gift for the coffee table of a modern poetry aficionado. —Library Journal

“A superb collection.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

"Our plesance here is all vain-glory/ This false warld is bot transitory," wrote William Dunbar in his 16th-century poem, "Lament for the Makaris." The piece was not only a meditation on death but a memorial to a slew of influential writers (Chaucer, and the like) who had passed on. Now, borrowing title, theme and rhyme scheme, Merwin, at age 69, does likewise: "The notes in some anthology/ listed persons born after me." So he turns to embrace a star-studded corpus. Twenty-three of his mentors, from Frost to Plath to Roethke to Merrill, are fondly, if briefly, remembered in this 208-line dirge ("then word of the death of Stevens/ brought a new knowledge of silence"). And, in a stroke of clever marketing, a single poem from each of the departed, complete with photo and mini-obit, rounds out what is essentially a coffee-table book of a dead poets' society, a small but rich anthology of poems by 20th-century practitioners who influenced Merwin. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The poem that provides the title for this mini-anthology of modern poetry is Merwin's memorial to 23 contemporary poets, all now dead, whom he counts as influences. "Lament for the Makers" is a 52-stanza memento mori addressing the age-old issue of the mortality of humans and the alleged immortality of art through a kind of poetic roll call of such luminaries as Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore, to name a few. The idea is to expand Merwin's poem into a commemorative book by including a representative poem from each poet along with a photograph and brief biography. The result is hard to classify-more than a poetic tribute, less than an anthology. It is perhaps best described as an elegant gift for the coffee table of a modern poetry aficionado. Recommended for informed lay readers.-Thomas F. Merrill, Univ. of Delaware, Newark

Library Journal