WorksSeven Poets, Four Days, One Book (2009)
In the fall of 2007, Christopher Merrill hatched a plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. They would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read them aloud to the group, jotting down words and lines and images with which to start new poems, and so it went until they had created 7 Poets 4 Days 1 Book. Scale and Stairs (2009)
The poems of Heeduck Ra are charged with a friction between image and idea, sound and sense. She glimpses an arc, which may light a path from the visible world to the invisible. Her work occupies the ever-shifting border region between what we know and what we do not know, a zone in which to apprehend the world anew. Because of The Rain: An Anthology of Korean Zen Poetry (2006)
Buddhism was introduced to Korea via China in the fifth century and similar to China and Japan a long tradition of Zen poetry developed. This collection spans 1,500 years of this tradition with a selection of the key poets and teachers starting with Great Master Wonhyo the founder of Korean Zen Buddhism. Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (2005)
If you were a poet returning from war-ravaged Yugoslavia with a marriage on the rocks and credit-card companies after you, where would you go to get away from it all? Christopher Merrill’s choice, several times between 1998 and the millennium’s eve, was Mount Athos. --Matthew Spencer, The Spectator, April 24, 2004 Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars (2001)
A chronicle of the writer’s ten war-time journeys to the Balkans. At once a travelogue, a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under siege, this book provides a portrait of the poetry, the politics, and the people of the Balkans. Brilliant Water (2001)
“Christopher Merrill has always been a poet of the outdoors. ... For Merrill, the pastoral landscape is a scaffold upon which he can construct a more contemporary poetic experience, one that mimics the actions of the mind without lapsing into the personal. These poems put T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative to work; each poetic journey symbolizes, from a distance, a personal or collective frame of mind.” --David Roderick, Verse Watch Fire (1995)
“Christopher Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinarily rich generation. His range of sympathy, subject, and tone has always been prodigious. His grasp of form is sure and in the service of a clear attention. This collection shows a complex talent developing and extending its original high promise.” --W.S. Merwin |
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