The Way Back - by W S Merwin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Published in celebration of W.S. Merwin's centennial, this landmark anthology inaugurates The Merwin Conservancy Books, a new series honoring one of America's greatest poets and environmental visionaries.

WS Merwin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Poet Laureate of the US was renowned in his lifetime for his commitment to environmental stewardship, and to poetry. Both in his practice of land stewardship, as he vibrantly transformed destroyed landscapes, and in writing, as he blended human and environmental considerations through seven decades of poetry and prose. Just as he has single-handedly enriched a living landscape, Merwin is credited with having written some of the most remarkable poetry of the late 20th and early 21st century, gathering awards at every turn while deeply influencing the practice of poetry across the world. In celebration of his 100th birthday, The Way Back highlights Merwin's literary and ecological legacy, while sampling from across more than 40 books of poetry and prose.

With this engaged retrospective, Copper Canyon Press is launching a new book imprint, The Merwin Conservancy Books, featuring previously unpublished Merwin works, reissues, and ecologically inspired titles dedicated to the literature of the environmental imagination. These books will be curated in collaboration with the Merwin Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to the stewardship of his literary legacy, as well as to the rare palm forest which Merwin planted through years of daily practice, with profits going to the preservation of Merwin's majestic palm forest.

Review Quotes

Praise for W.S. Merwin

"Poring slowly over these pages--essential as they are--just might be the wisest prescriptive, balm for the soul, in the wake of the poet's final absence." --Chicago Tribune

"Merwin's masterfully refined, meditative poems stem from his dwelling mindfully in one beloved place and handling words as though they are seeds, flowers, stones, and water... Merwin has attained a transcendent and transformative elevation of beaming perception, exquisite balance, and clarifying beauty." --Booklist, starred review

"A reader cannot avoid feeling a sense of legacy in cracking the covers of The Essential W.S. Merwin: the title alone exposes what readers of Merwin's work have known for decades, that this is important work, that Merwin's words are the bearers of effect." --Bruce Arien Wasserman, New York Journal of Books

"In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth, and his heartache at time's passing, Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page." --Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

"W.S. Merwin's legacy is unquestionably secure: his best and most fierce poems are moody, visionary compositions that dive into the unconscious and the seeds of existence with an inwardness and scrutiny unique in American poetry." --Poetry

"[The Essential W.S. Merwin] beautifully demonstrates why Merwin has been one of America's most decorated and important poets for more than 60 years." --Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"Simple astonishment, one of the rarest of all literary experiences, is the most potent outcome; in Merwin's best poems, he seems brought up short by his own discoveries." --Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

"Merwin sees the world as fallen, or falling, yet through this chaos he sees the divine." --Paris Review

"Merwin [is] fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and served as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2010. He graduated from Princeton University in 1948, where he studied with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur. From 1949 to 1951, he worked as a tutor in France, Mallorca, and Portugal; for several years afterward, he supported himself primarily by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese.

His first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than seven decades, Merwin published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His work is distinguished by its bold commitment to formal experimentation and transformation, rooted in the moral necessity of bearing witness and shaped by his lifelong commitments to environmental stewardship, pacifism, and anti-imperialism.

Among many honors, Merwin received two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. W.S. Merwin died on March 15, 2019, at his home near Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaiʻi. He was 91.

Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.