James Merrill's Apocalypse


Book Description

"Materer interprets Merrill's body of work from the perspective of his epic The Changing Light at Sandover and shows that in his earliest poems and in the volumes preceding The Changing Light, Merrill repeatedly expressed his fear of nuclear holocaust and his sense that some momentous revelation was near at hand. Materer demonstrates how apocalyptic motifs also inspire Late Settings, The Inner Room, and A Scattering of Salts."--BOOK JACKET.




The Changing Light at Sandover


Book Description

Mystical poems explore the author's experiences communicating with a spirit named Ephraim through an Ouija board




Revelation


Book Description

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.




Familiar Spirits


Book Description

Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit.




A Whole World


Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.




Greatshadow


Book Description

The warrior woman known as Infidel is legendary for her superhuman strength and skin tough as chain mail. She’s made few friends during her career as a sword-for-hire, and many powerful enemies. Following the death of her closest companion, Infidel finds herself weary of life as a mercenary and sets her eyes on one final prize that will allow her to live out the rest of her days in luxury, the priceless treasure trove of Greatshadow. Greatshadow is the primal dragon of fire. His malign intelligence spies upon mankind through every flickering candle, patiently waiting to devour victims careless with even the smallest flame. The Church of the Book has assembled a team of twelve battle-hardened adventurers to slay the dragon once and for all. But tensions run high between the leaders of the quest who view the mission as a holy duty and the super-powered mercenaries who add power to their ranks, who dream only of Greatshadow’s vast wealth. If the warriors fail to slay the beast, will they doom mankind to death by fire? Greatshadow is the first book in an exciting new adventure series, blending superheroes and epic fantasy into a unique take on both genres.




Modernist Alchemy


Book Description

Modernist Alchemy takes a close look at the work of twentieth-century poets whose use of the occult constitutes a recovery of discarded beliefs and modes of thought: Yeats and Plath try to dismiss conventional religion, Hughes captures a sense of adventure, H.D. seeks to liberate repressed concepts, while Duncan and Merrill hunt for a lost understanding of sexual identity which will allow for androgyny and homosexuality.




Collected Poems


Book Description

An essential addition to every shelf of 20-century poetry.




Another Language of Flowers


Book Description

Twelve imaginary blooms on twelve canvases - one for each




Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry


Book Description

The eve of the second millennium falls fifty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Looking across the spectrum of American poetry since 1945, John Gery explores the role that poets have begun to play in the nuclear age. While their diverse voices join in protesting against the end of the world, poetry also embodies what Gery calls "the way of nothingness" in contemporary experience, an individual sense of human continuity paradoxically coupled with a global sense of impending annihilation. The first full-length study of nuclear theory and American poetry, this book examines four distinct poetic approaches to nuclear culture - protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psycho-historical poetry, and the poetry of uncertainty. Each is developed through a discussion of representative poems from a range of poets, including an extended study of works by Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. As a chorus of voices, Gery contends, these poets articulate both resistance to annihilation and an acceptance of the nuclear present.