James Merrill

The Changing Light at Sandover: A Poem

James Merrill

• 1983 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1983 NBCC–Poetry winner
• Score: 20.33

A vast, sacred epic poem for a postreligious age. The poem was dictated by a ouija board over a period of twenty years, and it reveals the dangers confronting the human race—a work that combines narrative, drama, humor, and lyricism.

Inner Room: Poems

James Merrill

• 1990 Bobbitt Prize winner
• Score: 10.4

James Merrill’s new collection, The Inner Room, combines symmetry with surprise. The first and last of its five parts include, in addition to diverse two masterly long poems each (”Morning Glory” and “A Room at the Heart of Things” in Part I and “Walks in Rome” and “Losing the Marbles” in Part V). The central section, an arrangement of shorter poems and a bittersweet meditation written some years ago but not collected until now, is framed by the book’s most startling accomplishments.

In Part II Merrill returns to the verse drama, a genre that he has…

Mirabell: Books of Number

James Merrill

• 1979 NBA–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.29

Divine Comedies: Poems

James Merrill

• 1977 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.27

Selected Poems: 1946-1985

James Merrill

• 1993 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.43

This new Selected Poems replaces an earlier selection of work by James Merrill entitled From the First Nine (1982), now out of print; it includes 121 poems taken from that work and from Late Settings (1985), but it excludes the long narrative poem “The Changing Light at Sandover”, which is republished simultaneously in a separate volume. Together the two give solid definition to a body of poetic work that must be accounted among the finest in English of our time.

Of James Merrill, the critic Harold Bloom has said, “He is indisputably a…