CHRISTOPHER MERRILL

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences. The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination. Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other—and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future—which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

The richly imagined fables, vignettes, and prose poems of Flares reveal the elementary strangeness of this world. Here is the improvised travel record of a poet haunted by history, who documents what he discovers in foreign lands with an exacting and hallucinatory eye. Composed in transit, on diplomatic missions to scores of countries, Flares will endure in the reader’s imagination as a series of signals in the night, illuminating the hidden corners of our time here on earth.

In the course of researching dogwood trees, beloved poet and essayist Christopher Merrill realized that a number of formative moments in his life had some connection to the tree named--according to one writer--because its fruit was not fit for a dog. As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Merrill began to compose a self-portrait alongside this tree whose lifespan is comparable to a human's and that, from an early age, he's regarded as a talisman. Dogwoods have never been far from Merrill's view at significant moments throughout his life, helping to shape his understanding of place in the great chain of being; entwined in his experience is the conviction that our relationship to the natural world is central to our walk in the sun. The feeling of a connection to nature has become more acute as his life has taken him to distant corners of the earth, often to war zones where he has witnessed not only humankind's propensity for violence and evil but also the enduring power of connections that can be forged across languages, borders, and politics. Dogwoods teach us persistence humility and wonder. Self-Portrait with Dogwood is no ordinary memoir, but rather the work of a traveler who has crisscrossed the country and the globe in search of ways to make sense of his time here. Merrill provides new ways of thinking about personal history, the environment, politics, faith, and the power of the written word. In his descriptions of places far and near, many outside of the average American's purview--a besieged city in Bosnia, a hidden path in a Taiwanese park, Tolstoy's country house in Russia, a castle in Slovakia, a blossoming dogwood at daybreak in Seattle--the reader's understanding of the world will flourish as well.

"Prose was always meant for colloquy, risk, and intimacy. With these rich and conversant prose poems, Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill return spoken language to sport--sometimes competitive, but often cooperative, exploratory, even humanely probative. What is a friend? Bell and Merrill demonstrate friendship is drawn from imagination."--Stephen Kuusisto, author of Letters to Borges "The best conversationalists intuit and respond to unspoken questions and interstitial meanings, sidelong concerns and secret subjects. They also know how to listen to another's story and hear the line or inflection that calls forth their own tale in a way that enlarges, well, everything. Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill's stunning epistolary paragraphs illustrate the inner workings of just such an intimate, agile, and sustained conversation. This collaborative, high wire act offers up profound truths in exactly the way the most exciting poems take shape--by leaps of imagination and complete trust in the power of association to bring up riches, songs, and wisdom from the depths."--Lia Purpura After the Fact is a lively and imaginative conversation between two legendary poets. Marvin Bell, writing from Iowa City and Port Townsend, and Christopher Merrill, writing from around the world, give us an intimate look into collaboration at its best. Christopher Merrill's recent books include Boat and Necessities. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Marvin Bell's works include collaborations with poet William Stafford and volumes of an original poetic form, most recently collected in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems.

Like Neruda and Paz, Perse and Milosz, Christopher Merrill is both a writer and a cultural envoy, crisscrossing the globe as chronicler and courier. Boat records a series of passages over a decade, employing varied formal strategies: meditations and fantasias, prose poems and versets, lyric sequences and narratives, translations and ghazals. Composed in war zones and embassies, refugee camps and monasteries, Boat is a logbook tracking questions of memory, the body and body politic, faith, mortality, and the ways of knowledge moves through generations. Reflecting ten years of life on the wing and forty years of writing, including extensive translation from other languages, Boat bears witness to what Merrill has heard and seen in places most Americans will never visit.

"In this rendering, the Psalms become once again what they were for Christian believers from the very beginning: the hymnal of the Church. They remain, certainly, the songs of Israel: from its cries of lamentation to its shouts of exultation. But for the Christian reader, they become as well hymns of petition and praise that express both the joy and the longing of those who live 'in Christ' . . . At the same time their very language can convey to us the assurance that, as he has throughout the millennia, God hears our prayer and responds to it with boundless mercy, love, and compassion."--from the Preface by Fr. John BreckProfessor Sheehan's brief introductory exposition of the Davidic roots of Psalms and the poetics of chiasmus guides us in understanding how the ruining oppositions of actual experience are held in Psalms within the musical disciplines of lyric art: held, until God Himself can be seen in the ruins: seen, and felt, and overwhelmingly and gratefully loved. The psalmist's world doesn't change as he turns his experience toward God. What changes is he himself. How he changes is toward acquiring the very mind of Christ, to which each of us is called.

"Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinary rich generation. His range of sympathy, subject, and tone has always been prodigious."--W. S. Merwin Necessities is a meditation on the deepest promptings of the spirit that could be discovered through language. Influenced by his reading of Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other explorers of the marvelous, these poems are parables, which deepen with each reading. Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, more than a dozen edited volumes and books of translations, and five works of nonfiction. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Centred around three journeys to Mount Athos, one of the most important places in Orthodox Christianity, this is both a travel book and a journey of self-discovery in a world beset by violence and fear.

Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars is a chronicle of poet and critic Christopher Merrill's ten war-time journeys to the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. At once a travelogue, a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under siege, this beautifully written and personal narrative takes the reader along on the author's journeys to all the provinces and republics of the former Yugoslavia—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina—as well as to Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey. His journeys provide the narrative structure for an exploration of the roles and responsibility of intellectuals caught up in a decisive historical moment, many of whom either helped to incite the war or else bore eloquent witness to its carnage. What separates this book-the first non-native literary work on the conflict-from other collections of reportage, political analysis, and polemic, is its concern for capturing the texture of particular places in the midst of dramatic change-the sounds and sights and smells, the stories and observations of victim and perpetrator alike, the culture of war. Here is a literary meditation on war, a fascinating portrait of the poetry, politics and the people of the Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and future of those war-torn lands. Hear an interview with the author on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered, February 20th, 'Balkan Poets.'

Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars is a chronicle of poet and critic Christopher Merrill's ten war-time journeys to the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. At once a travelogue, a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under siege, this beautifully written and personal narrative takes the reader along on the author's journeys to all the provinces and republics of the former Yugoslavia—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina—as well as to Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey. His journeys provide the narrative structure for an exploration of the roles and responsibility of intellectuals caught up in a decisive historical moment, many of whom either helped to incite the war or else bore eloquent witness to its carnage. What separates this book-the first non-native literary work on the conflict-from other collections of reportage, political analysis, and polemic, is its concern for capturing the texture of particular places in the midst of dramatic change-the sounds and sights and smells, the stories and observations of victim and perpetrator alike, the culture of war. Here is a literary meditation on war, a fascinating portrait of the poetry, politics and the people of the Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and future of those war-torn lands. Hear an interview with the author on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered, February 20th, "Balkan Poets."

This is a collection including poems from Christopher Merrill's first two books as well as later poems. It concludes with his exquisite long poem 'Luck', which begins "For those not born to wealth or royalty, / Luck's a language learned by fits and starts". Merrill treats the fickleness of fate -- and humanity's attempts to define fate -- with both poignancy and humour. His imagery enters the mind like a new dialect, not with trite or cliched metaphors, but startling and uncommon word pictures that heighten the mood as well as the senses, such as in 'The Rope': "Your eyes, when you turn away, burn black -- before you disappear, / leaving on the sidewalk a trail of charcoal". Merrill's art is for those who love uniqueness in poetry.