Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Merwin and Other Poets.- Chapter 2: "High Company": W.S. Merwin, John Berryman and the Art of Poetry.- Chapter 3: The Value and Forms of Contact in the Work of William Carlos Williams and W.S. Merwin.- Chapter 4: The Lost Steps: W. S. Merwin and the Journey Backward.- Part II: Nature, Zen and Ecopoetics.- Chapter 5: Bound to Reverence: Not Knowing, Emptiness, Time, and Nature in W.S. Merwin's Poetry.- Chapter 6: Merwin's Ecopoetic Conservancy.- Chapter 7: Reverence for Nature: Trees in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and Others.- Chapter 8: The Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin.- Part III: The Poet's Craft.- Chapter 9: "A Sense of Being Linked with People": Poetry, Listening, Intonation.- Chapter 10: Lyric "Unpunctuation": W. S. Merwin's Early New Yorker Correspondence.- Chapter 11: W.S. Merwin's Homecoming in the Heart of Europe.- Chapter 12: Resilience of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin's "Forgotten Language".- Part IV: The Sense of an Ending.- Chapter 13: W.S. Merwin's "Retirement": Late Style and Themes in the 1990s and After.- Chapter 14: Merwin's Epic of Dispossession.- Chapter 15: Memory, Belatedness, and Paradise in W.S. Merwin's Later Poetry.- Chapter 16: "The Last Days of the World": Apocalyptic Visions in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and William Butler Yeats.

Cheri Colby Langdell, a member of the Emily Dickinson International Society, the Modernist Studies Association, and the Pacific Association of Ancient and Modern Languages, has published in the Emily Dickinson Journal and is the author of W.S. Merwin (1981) and Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change (2004), as well as other books, reviews and articles. She has taught at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Southern California, and in the UK at the University of Nottingham, the University of Leicester, Birkbeck University of London and Queen Mary University of London. She now teaches at East Los Angeles College and Los Angeles Valley College, USA.