icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

Necessities (2013)

"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 Kafka, Calvino, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other explorers of the marvelous, these poems are parables, which, with any luck, deepen with each reading.

 

Buy the book on Amazon.

Read an excerpt! (196 KB)

PRAISE FOR NECESSITIES

"Merrill's deeply felt "necessities"—for honesty in the face of lies, for political justice, for a clear-eyed view of the world we now live in are all the more compelling because of the way they come to us joined to their opposites, to what appears to be disconnected from the space they occupy..." Click here to read the rest of this review for Merrill's newest book.