The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9780689112836
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book

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

The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9780689112836
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book

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

The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book

Book Description


A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover

A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: Robert Polito
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472065240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
An invaluable road map for the epic poem of our time

The Book of Ephraim

The Book of Ephraim PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525520244
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.

A Whole World

A Whole World PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 110187550X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 745

Get Book

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.

The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525659285
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 730

Get Book

Book Description
James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world. The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, and utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry.

James Merrill

James Merrill PDF Author: Langdon Hammer
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375413332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 978

Get Book

Book Description
"A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--

The Consuming Myth

The Consuming Myth PDF Author: Stephen Yenser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674166158
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book

Book Description
Yenser ranges over all of Merrill's writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet's novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.

Familiar Spirits

Familiar Spirits PDF Author: Alison Lurie
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
Among the results of this intense preoccupation with the occult were a book-length poem, which some critics have called a masterpiece, and the possible destruction of several lives.".

The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 648

Get Book

Book Description
This dazzling epic poem remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years starting in 1976.