The Rain in the Trees

by W. S. Merwin

Overview

A volume of poems concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and with history and how the world endures it—from 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394758589
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/12/1988
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	551,451
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

W. S. MERWIN was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca, and over the course of his life, he lived in many parts of the world.
 
He was the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Governor's Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He died in 2019.

Editorial Reviews

"One of the greatest poets of our age. He is a rare spiritual presence in American life and letters (the Thoreau of our era).” —Edward Hirsch

“One of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry" —The New Yorker

From the Publisher

The sounds of wind and rain and the images of trees and pastures form melancholy leitmotifs in the latest volume of lyrics by this master prosodist. All slight and understated, these poems depend on nuance and the emotional color of Merwin's mellifluous language for their effect. They ask one to imagine a world not patently given here, but only suggested by sudden, fleeting illuminations: they comprise ``a kind of whispered sighing/ not far/ like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark/ the echo of everything that has ever/ been spoken/ still spinning its one syllable/ between the earth and silence.'' The love poems in particular are so elusive and wispy they seem hardly to stand alone, but to need each other as a group, as well as a good deal of imaginative participation on the part of the reader. Similarly, his theme of the loss of the archaic earthly Eden through the march of progress is defined by only the vaguest mythical outline. Yet, however muted and minor this collection, one is entranced as ever by the unparalleled discipline of Merwin's silver tongue. (April)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Five years after his last collection, Pulitzer Prize-winner Merwin offers no surprises, just the same steady hand and vision we have come to expect from one of the giants of contemporary American poetry. Mostly short lyrics, with unnamed landscapes, unidentified personas, and a gloss of surrealism, these poems exemplify the style Merwin has mastered over the past 35 years: ``On the last day of the world/ I would want to plant a tree/ . . . I want a tree that stands/ in the earth for the first time.'' Yet his rendering of contemporary scenes is also effective. There has been so much good Merwin over the last three decades that publication of his Selected Poems due this summerwill surely be a literary event. Until then, this new work will keep us. Thom Tammaro, Moorhead Univ., Moorhead, Minn.

Library Journal