Christopher Merrill

The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War (2011)
Composed in the key of terror, Christopher Merrill explores how history is shaped by ceremonies, expeditions, and wars. He observes the performance of a banned ritual in Malaysia, retraces Saint-John Perse's epic journey from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, and tours the Levant in the wake of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Encountering a wide range of people along the way--artists and politicians, soldiers and refugees--Merrill is as attentive to their individuality as he is attuned to the historical, social, and cultural situations in which they find themselves.

Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book (2009)
In the fall of 2007, Christopher Merrill hatched a plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. They would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read them aloud to the group, jotting down words and lines and images with which to start new poems, and so it went until they had created 7 Poets 4 Days 1 Book.

Scale and Stairs (2009)
The poems of Heeduck Ra are charged with a friction between image and idea, sound and sense. She glimpses an arc, which may light a path from the visible world to the invisible. Her work occupies the ever-shifting border region between what we know and what we do not know, a zone in which to apprehend the world anew.

Because of The Rain: An Anthology of Korean Zen Poetry (2006)
Buddhism was introduced to Korea via China in the fifth century and similar to China and Japan a long tradition of Zen poetry developed. This collection spans 1,500 years of this tradition with a selection of the key poets and teachers starting with Great Master Wonhyo the founder of Korean Zen Buddhism.

Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (2005)
If you were a poet returning from war-ravaged Yugoslavia with a marriage on the rocks and credit-card companies after you, where would you go to get away from it all? Christopher Merrill’s choice, several times between 1998 and the millennium’s eve, was Mount Athos.

Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars (2001)
A chronicle of the writer’s ten war-time journeys to the Balkans. At once a travelogue, a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under siege, this book provides a portrait of the poetry, the politics, and the people of the Balkans.

Brilliant Water (2001)
“Christopher Merrill has always been a poet of the outdoors. ... For Merrill, the pastoral landscape is a scaffold upon which he can construct a more contemporary poetic experience, one that mimics the actions of the mind without lapsing into the personal. These poems put T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative to work; each poetic journey symbolizes, from a distance, a personal or collective frame of mind.”

Watch Fire (1995)
“Christopher Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinarily rich generation. His range of sympathy, subject, and tone has always been prodigious. His grasp of form is sure and in the service of a clear attention. This collection shows a complex talent developing and extending its original high promise.”

The 'Other' Twin Towers (2011)

The mind reels before such destruction – which is why so many turned to poetry in the days following 9/11...What follows is the opening of an essay published in Granta Magazine on September 12, a timely trek over ground broken in The Tree of the Doves. Merrill delves at once into post-9/11 fundamentalism and the refuge of expression:

Khalil Ibrahim’s self-portrait, in a retrospective exhibition at a gallery in the Petronas Twin Towers, was an essay in double vision: the artist stood before a table, an unfinished floral painting at his back, the left side of his face in such thick shadow that only the arm of his eyeglasses could be seen. But it was impossible to tell where the light came from (since the blank part of the canvas behind him, which was as bright and harsh as sunlight, had a shadow of its own, as if another figure were lurking somewhere in the studio), or whatever the source of the different shadows might be...Read the full article here.