Product Description: In this haunting, elegantly written memoir, W. S. Merwin recalls in utterly unsentimental prose his youth, growing up in a repressed Presbyterian household in the small river towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The complex portrait that emerges of a family without language or history, transforms the story of their isolated lives into the development of a writer’s conscience and a warning about the fate of a middle class eager to obliterate origins...read more

Brief essays examine identity, consciousness, and our interaction with the world

Poems deal with poets, naturalists, expatriates, the past, nature, survival, hope, and the seasons

Poems deal with spring, trees, city life, the past, dreams, farms, childhood, rain, travel, insects, superstition, and language

An important new translation of the second section of Dante's great masterwork, created by the poetauthor of The River Sound and The Folding Cliffs, follows the narrator's odyssey, guided by the poet Virgil and inspired by his love for Beatrice, up the Mount of Purgatory toward Paradise. 15,000 first printing.