W.S. Merwin's collection of poetry entitled "The Rain In The Trees" is nothing short of magnificent. All the poems in it are extremely strong and powerful.

This is not escapist poetry in any sense, really. It is largely about how humans are damaging the earth, trees, vegetation, and animals. But, it is not propaganda poetry at all ... it is powerful, passionate, balanced poetry that has linguistic and artistic integrity at all times.

My favorite poem in here is "Chord," about the disappearance of Sandalwood trees in the early nineteenth century. The language is breathtaking.

This is a great book of poetry, and I recommend it to everybody.

W. S. Merwin is clearly a major figure in American poetry. His work, emphasizing nature, memory, plants, the forest, is thought-provoking, insightful, and delightful. If you buy only one book of poetry this year, buy this one. Everyone we have shared the book with has become absolutely enchanted- a true masterpiece.

Composed by a master poet in the prime of his gifts, this astonishing collection of poems rather accompanies one like wind does, like the beautiful common thoughts of our soiled minds and hearts do, when we're not looking. Each poem is a new radiance- transparent, mighty, striking our daily consciousness like an arrow of air might. The themes of common sight, of restlessness, of the illusions of time and touch, are woven with such skill that one can breathe these poems rather than read them, live out their heart as though it were one's own creed, and so leave like a snow-print upon one's interior faint marks of the truest art imaginable, having silently manifested and yet changed everything. If you believe you have encountered the art of poetry and have not read W. S. Merwin, get this book. It is an experience that renews humility.

These moving poems stay with you. With their graceful flatness, many feel like strange, shimmering fragments of narrative; there is an interplay of mystery and revelation that opens onto a new--or forgotten--realm of poetic experience.

This book is composed of reprints of earlier volumes--as many of Merwin's volumes are now being combined and republished. The poems are beautiful and thought-provoking. Best are the poems from "The Compass Flower"--some of love, some of nature. A master poet.

If you ever wondered if medieval poetry and the lives of the people who wrote it was in some way intimidating or academic, `The Mays of Ventadorn` provides a truely unique way of experiencing it. W.S. Merwin, in his charateristic style, brings to life Ventadorn (places and personalities) the center of the troubadour universe by weaving his own personal relationship with the region, the era and its poets. This book is a wonderful journey through Merwin's experience and how he has found value and meaning in the troubadours -- It will leave you wanting more poetry and a plane ticket to Southwest France.

I believe that Merwin is one of our best translators of Latin American Poetry and his work with Juarroz is no exception. He successfully offers the english reader Juarroz's funneled abyss. Although Roberto Juarroz's complete works have been translated into French, he still lacks the necessary appreciation in the english speaking world. W.S. Merwin at least offers strong selections from Juarroz's earliest and most profound volumes. If one is interested in la otredad as described by writers such as Borges and Paz, I highly recommend this book for further investigation.

Finding first rate translations can be a hit and miss affair. However, this it definitely a "hit". Merwin's translation of Euripides' tragedy is masterful and deserves the glowing reviews it has received here as elsewhere. Readers of this review might be interested to know that it is part of a series called "The Greek Tragedy in New Translations". And while it is out of print, good used copies are freely available in the Amazon marketplace -- which is where I secured mine.

Merwin has rendered a taut, readable version in modern English. And the volume is supplemented with an extremely interesting introduction by George Dimock -- with which I am not sure I entirely agree -- though he does a fine job of fitting the play within the context of the Peloponnesian War.

For me, the riveting aspect of this work is the treatment that Achilles gets (Agamemnon, of course, gets a good drubbing, which is satisfying -- but hardly unexpected!). We see him at Aulis, a young man as yet unbowed and unbloodied by the years of warfare at Troy. Dimock makes a rather startling remark when he asseverates, "The one thing that his [Achilles] speeches do not contain is simple human feeling such as Paris might entertain: it does not seem to have occurred to him that a young girl is about to die." And he is rather critical of Achilles for this (I might even say that his introduction is suffused with "pro-Trojan" sympathies). But for me, isn't this rather the whole point? Of course Achilles is like this, it took TEN years of warfare and the death of Patroclus for him to learn (and recall that he ALONE among the Greeks appears to have absorbed the lesson) how to be "human" -- on this see Bernard Knox's introduction to Robert Fagles' brilliant translation of the Iliad. I prefer the General Editor's view on this when he says, "the play enacts the heroic education of Achilles." Well, at least it enacts the very early stages of it!

Merwin is a wonderful poet -- and I would also recommend his translation of Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso. For readers in search of other top notch modern translations, see Stanley Lombardo's truly astonishing translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. See also Nicholas Pevear's translation of Aias.

Here is a sample of Merwin's translation (from the Chorus's reaction to a speech of Agamemnon's):

"O Cyprian,
most beautiful of the goddesses, keep
such wild flights from me.
Let me know love
within reason and desire within
marraige, and feel your presence
not your rage.
The natures of humans
are various, and human ways of acting
are different,
but everyone knows what is right,
and teaching
inclines them at last to virtue."

Of the half dozen or so plays I've read in Oxford University Press's "Greek Tragedy in New Translations" series, this is the best.

An excellent synopsis and analysis of the play precedes a beautiful translation, smoothing the way for students. The play is one of the keys to understanding the Trojan War -- in addition to recapping the beef the Greeks have with Troy, there is much foreshadowing of what will happen ten years down the road.

After reading Iphigeneia at Aulis, it's difficult to cut any of those Greek heroes any slack. If the situation weren't so horrible and tragic, the interactions and reactions of some of the characters would be funny: Achilles, for example, extremely annoyed that Agamemnon would take his name in vain when tricking Iphigeneia into coming to Aulis; if Agamemnon had asked him for his help first, then tricking the girl into coming to be sacrificed would have been okay. Or Menelaos, coming around to Agamemnon's way of thinking (that it would, after all, be wrong to kill Iphigeneia), and suggesting that only he, Agamemnon and Kalchas the priest know about the need for a sacrifice to get a fair wind to Troy, and that Kalchas won't tell: "Not if he's dead."

This play, and this translation, are probably one of the best introductions a student could have to Greek tragedy.

"Iphigenia at Aulis" was the last play written by Euripides and represents his most cynical depiction of the mythological heroes. The subject is the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, is order to appease the goddess Artemis, so that the Achaen fleet can have fair winds to sail to Troy and bring back Helen. I have used this play as part of large unit on the Trojan War right before proceding to Homer's epic poem the "Iliad." Not only does the play come at that point in terms of the chronology of the war, but it clearly foreshadows the initial confrontation in the "Iliad" between Agamemnon and Achilles over Briseis of the lovely arms. Euripides invests the beginning of Homer's saga with painful irony as Agamemnon rejects the pleas of Briseis's father; after all, has the Achean leader really forgotten the pain of sacrificing his daughter ten years earlier? In Euripides's play it becomes clear that Agamemnon does not care for his daughter; she is but a bargaining chip in his ploy for power. As her father and ruler Agamemnon could simply order his daughter to come to Aulis, but instead he concocts a fake marriage to Achilles, the most eligible of the young Achean heroes. Of course this brings not only Iphigenia, but her mother Clytemnestra, which allows Euripides to bring into play the murder of Agamemnon by his wife when he returns from the Trojan War. When Achilles finds out he has been a pawn in this deadly little game he is incensed, but in the end he turns out to be as foolish and as wicked as the rest of the characters. All of the sympathy goes towards Iphigenia, the only true hero in the drama since she alone acts selflessly. Any one teaching the "Iliad" should at least provide the gist of "Iphigenia at Aulis" as background material, along with the story of the judgment of Paris. The supplementary material talks about the play's meaning in the context of the Peloponnesian War, so there are other contexts in which Euripides's play is of interest.

La importancia de la obra de Vicente Huidobro (CHILE 1893-1948 ) para el surgimiento de los movimientos de vanguardia en América Latina y, en general, en el ámbito de lengua española, ha sido reconocida hace ya suficiente tiempo. Huidobro es -junto a César Vallejo, Oliverio Girondo, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Gullén, entre otros- uno de los fundadores de la gran poesía latinoamericana de la primera mitad del siglo. Ecuatorial o Poemas árticos (ambos de 1918) se convirtieron de inmediato en modelos para la renovación de la poesía de su época en América Latina y España. Altazor es una de las contribuciones hispanoamericanas a la poesía del siglo XX. ( Federico Schopf )

Huidobro is a character. Having read most of what he wrote in spanish, I still miss a good translation of his theater plays. Hopefully made by the chilean foundation. I got a book on Neruda that was translated here in US and the name of the translator was bigger than the one of the Nobel Laureate. Not to talk about copyright issues.

Huidobro is considered one of the top four Latin poets, he is certainly the least known, but in my view he is the best. This book gives a sampling of his best works, throughout his career, translated into english. Huidobro liked to take differrent words and images that don't belong together and invent new realities. In the beginning of "Altazor" his masterpeice, he talks of his mother who had, "flag colored hair, and eyes full of distant ships."

The complete version of Altazor is also in print, although I prefer the translation in this book. The poetry within is masterful, beautiful, and unlike anything I have yet read.

"Basically I love you

you are paler than an hour and the source of myth

your eyelids alone take flight

and you're more beautiful by far

Than a return trip from the Artic"

This is not just a little book of poems. Huidobro's work, words, and ideas are the ki! nd that take root. Phrases once read are remembered, and something new is found or understood with each reading. I highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in poetry.

Correction to Amazon: This review seems to also be appearing on the pages of Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam.

The "Selected Poems" we are actually talking about here (ISBN 0-689-70736-3) are W.S. Merwin's from 1952-1983. Since then he has published several more books of poetry, but they probably won't become part of a collection like this any time soon. (Merwin was reluctant to create this one.)

He shouldn't have been so reluctant. This is great, managable and cheap(!) way to meet Merwin, a major poet of our day who people just won't stop talking about. He's the most-published by The Atlantic magazine and he's had a remarkably varied career--as this 'Selection' attests.

His first few books (one of which was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award) are more formal and mythological. In _The Moving Target_ he starts swerving away from punctuation and conventional sytax eventually ending up in a place where...

a man with his eyes shut swam upward
through dark water and came to air
it was the horizon
he felt his way along it and it opened
and let the sun out

Not all of these poems are winners, in my opinion. But this is Merwin's pick of the litter and whatever seems a runt to me may just be bacon to you. Merwin's aesthetic gets more and more transparent that way. Buy it here used.

Oh and P.S. The book in this collection that won the Pulizter was _The Carrier of Ladders_.

Mandelshtam (1891-1938[?]) was a creative genius who suffered for his art - enduring official denounciation and harassment, arrest, exile, rearrest and death in a Stalinist labour camp. This volume offers a wide body of his work, from 1908 and poems published in his first book, Stone, to poems written in notebooks during his exile in Voronezh shortly before his rearrest in 1938. These poems were not published during his lifetime, and until they were discovered is was assumed that he had not written anything once exiled. The translations do a good job of conveying Mandlestam's power and the way that he was able to focus his creative and intellectual energies. They are outwardly simple enough, yet compell the reader to look them over again and again, to search for deeper meanings and hidden messages. Mandlestam's widow remarks in the forward that " the translations of Mr.Greene are the best I ever saw." This in itself is a good enough reason to make this volume your choice for getting to know one of the greatest poets of the 20th centuary.

i rate this book higher based on its foreword which, as a lecture, would provide a semester's worth of knowledge and recommended reading. a must for fans of arthurian legend (or fans of tolkien, who was a "great scholar of the Arthurian cycle"), and for those interested in welsh history and literature, poetry, troubador lore, linguistics, or the middle ages.

the translation itself i'm not qualified to judge; the _new york review of books_ "hails [Merwin] as one of the finest of our poets [and] a skilled and sensitive translator." J.D. McClatchy cover-blurbs the translation as being written with "clarity, ingenuity, and force."

as for the plot, it's great stuff: courtly knight of the round table honorably and courageously accepts what appears to be a pact of certain death, honorably averts the importunate seductions of his host's wife, agonizingly tells a white fib because doing so is the only thing that may save his life, and . . . i leave the rest for the reader to discover.

Merwin has risen to the challenge, and, unlike Gawain, he has prevailed triumphantly on the first stroke.

A new, exciting translation of the Arthurian legend, SIR GAWAIN & THE GREEN KNIGHT reads excitingly crisp and vibrant. A story with equal parts chivalry, temptation, redemption, and romance, Merwin's GAWAIN deserves to be read by a far wider audience or, even better, deserves a touring one-man roadshow presented theatrically. Easily explored in a single sitting, this clever tome should be required reading for any serious explorer of mythology, real or even the realms of pure fantasy.

Highest recommendation!

Since I suspect they will have similar audiences, I feel I should state right off the bat that W. S. Merwin's translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is not quite at the level of Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf". Heaney created an absolute masterpiece; the type of translation that comes along only once every few generations, and which completely redefines the view of the subject matter. The difference between the two translations lies in Heaney's ability to capture the meter and rhyme of "Beowulf" without being slavish to the original structure. Merwin has followed a similar approach in his translation, and while the language is beautiful, I didn't sense the same ancient vibrancy I got from Heaney's work.

That said, this book is more than worthy of the five-star rating that I gave it. Merwin's use of language is absolutely superb, and the resulting translation is a remarkable tapestry of images. In particular, he deftly captures the underlying tension and eroticism that forms such a key element of the story. Gawain's struggle to remain true to his code is rendered perfectly, and sets a mood of self-doubt that perfectly offsets his outward frivolity.

Since I have already mentioned "Beowulf" I might add for those unfamiliar with "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" that it is much more subtle than the former. While "Beowulf" is undeniably open to interpretation (indeed there is a wealth of fascinating scholarship surrounding it), its basic elements are much more straightforward. At its heart, as Tolkien espoused so brilliantly, "Beowulf" is a story about monsters, and what they mean in our world. On the other hand, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is more interested in exploring the ideals of chivalry and courtly love. While there is a fair bit of gore, it strikes me as being more of the hook to keep the reader engaged, rather than the core element of the story. Finally, in it's conclusion, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is far more vague than Beowulf.

Merwin has produced as a translation of the highest quality. While perhaps less "poetic" than some of its predecessors, it is written in a language that captures the full beauty and vibrancy of this remarkable poem. While a mere 84 pages in length (not including the opposing pages in Old English) this is a tale rich in metaphor that is a delight to read, and that will leave you pondering its meaning.

A truly exciting debut. This book is a theatrical production--a triumphant coming together of imagination, personality and style.

Once again the Yale Series of Younger Poets has brought a wonderful collection to print. Maurice Manning's "Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions" is a deeply intense book of poems that is likely to affect every reader that comes across it. At times frightening, the poems are about the world of a boy named Lawrence Booth, or Law, at different points during his childhood and adolescence. The characters and events are recounted in a wonderfully vivid manner, but much of the time you are left wondering what is really is occurring in Law's life, and what is just a "vision."
The most remarkable aspect of this book is the use of voice. Different poems are written in different ways, which contributes to the animated nature of the book. At one end of the spectrum are the "Dreadful Chapters" which are written in a backwoods voice that, on the page, may look confusing because of spelling, but when read aloud are amazingly real and powerful: "An why come Law git stuck wit such a name / dat he alway cipher wrong from right-- / so much he git a tooth-clench mood to fight?" (from "Dreadful Chapter Two). At the opposite end is a more elegant voice that uses beautiful metaphors: "Sheepish as a far off echo, Lawrence Booth wades / into the Great Fields and the wide-yawning night" (from "Bellwether"). And, of course, there are countless voices to be found in this collection that lie somewhere in between these two extremes.
One thing must be noted is that this collection is difficult to understand. The poems are not in chronological order, and are sometimes missing some information that is given in another poem later or earlier in the book. Furthermore, some poems are "unconventional." One is in the form of a geometry proof, and another is a complaint form. Personally, though, I think that the search for answers in this book is a big part of the joy in reading it. Piecing together information, finding links between poems because of a certain voice, phrase, or word used, and concentrating on the imagery and form was a pleasure to do, and it really added to the experience of the book. I feel that the ambiguity within the pages helps to suggest the uncertainty in Law's life.
I have rated Manning's book at five out of five stars. It was undoubtedly the best book of poetry I have come across this year, and I am sure he will be bringing us more in the future.

Compelling and captivating, this book kept me engrossed from cover to cover. The book keeps you guessing from beginning to end and hence engages the reader at all times. In the book, Maurice Manning gives us glimpses from the life of Lawrence Booth but holds back the entire picture and it is like a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing and hence the reader, trying to see the complete picture, is constantly guessing.
That is not the only charm that the book has. What is fascinating is that it is an adult painting a vision of the world through the eyes of a child and not just any child but the strange Lawrence Booth; a child with a fascinating and vivid imagination and a vision of the world that is colored by his troubled home life. A window in to the hopes, dreams and experiences of Lawrence, one cannot help but fall in love with this strange, distressed boy. Your heart goes out to this boy who has been robbed of a childhood due to his difficult family circumstances.
If it seems that the book is a collection of melodramatic and melancholic poems, it is certainly not true. For what stands out most in all these poems is the courage and spunk of Lawrence Booth. His indomitable spirit shines through each poem bringing forth a sense of self-deprecating humor despite his hard family life for he is "The boy with the brains God gave a goose. The boy who took thirteen rabies shots in the belly." This removes any possible air of depression from the book in fact the straight, matter of fact and brutally honest narration gives the book a humorous quality. The language used is honest and in the poems called "Dreadful chapters" it is written as it is spoken. His ability to capture in words not only the accent but also the true feelings and emotions make this book fascinating to read.
There is a wide variety of poems in this short collection for poems like "Shady Grove" will make you think of profound questions, the "Dreadful Chapters" might make you cringe with their language or disturbing scenarios, "Prisoner of Conscience" and "Seventeen" will make you laugh out loud at their blunt sincerity while poems such as "Beck" and "Complain" will astound you with their unconventional formats. Hence, even though the central characters remain the same, each poem offers something new and keeps the reader guessing where it fits in, into the greater picture of Lawrence Booth's life.
During the course of the book it is impossible to dissociate the voice of Manning from that of Booth, which is evidence of the success of the poetry, by the end you are immersed in Booth's friendship with Black Damon, his attachment to Red Dog and his love for the mysterious, Missionary Woman. this book is fascinating and interesting to read. Although some of the images and ideas are violent are disturbing they are thought provoking and sincere. And like any good book of poetry this book will leave you crying and laughing and most important of all, wanting you to come back to it again.