W. S Merwin

Oracular and elegant, W. S. Merwin's poetry reveals a heightened sense of what is essential to human consciousness: the fragile framing of nature, the mysteries of memory and perception, the inescapable fact of our mortality. In a career spanning seven decades- from his brilliant emergence as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets' Prize in 1952 to his recent term as U.S. Poet Laureate-he has fashioned a poetics unmistakably his own, marked by a stripped-down,...

"The First Four Books of Poems gathers all the poetry from W. S. Merwin's early books, including his celebrated debut, A Mask for Janus, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. In these poems, readers can witness the maturation of a commanding poetic voice, one which has profoundly marked American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.