W.S. Merwin: Collected Poems 1996-2011:

Here is the second volume in a definitive, career-spanning two-volume edition of the poems of the former U.S. Poet Laureate, which is also available as a deluxe boxed set, <i>The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin</i> (described below) .<br><br>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, unpunctuated style that foregrounds his responsiveness, spiritual insights, and facility with unadorned, elemental language. Now, with this two-volume edition, Merwin becomes only the second living poet to have his work collected by The Library of America. Here are such landmark books as his debut volume <i>A Mask for</i> <i>Janus </i>(1952) , which shows the young poet engaged in a fruitful dialogue with Auden and Berryman; <i>The Lice</i> (1967) , with its impassioned political poems about the Vietnam War and ecological catastrophe; <i>The Vixen</i> (1996) , which offers vivid recollections of southwestern France; the epic verse novel <i>The Folding Cliffs </i>(2008) , set in nineteenth-century Hawaii; and <i>The Shadow of Sirius</i> (2008) , with its &quot;late poems / that are made of words / that have come the whole way / they have been there.&quot;