The Inner Room

by James Merrill

A verse play about a saint carver accompanies poems about travel, memory, Japan, religion, friendship, and mortality

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 1988

About the author

James Ingram Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Patch · Rating 4 out of 5]

very beautiful. I loved losing the marbles, and I liked green cove spring because I also get sentimental about swimming pools. I think the mix of poetry, prose, and play was really interesting. I know this is just a compilation of already published work, but itd be really cool to see an author/poet do something mixing formats as a work of its own.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M5713i 1988

[Gregory Knapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who's a better 20th Century post-war poet than Merrill?