Summer Doorways

June 27, 2005
In 34 brief, dreamy chapters, esteemed American poet and translator Merwin meanders back to the late 1940s and early 1950s summers of his youth and inexperience. At age 16, he was blessedly released from the watchful protection of his stern Presbyterian father in Scranton, Pa., to attend Princeton, when the university was bereft of young men serving in WWII. Through a Princeton acquaintance, Alain Prévost (son of French writer Jean Prévost), the impressionable young Merwin secured the position of tutor to Prévost's friend Alan Stuyvesant's nephew, Peter, and spent an idyllic summer at the eminent family's bucolic home, Deer Park, in Hackettstown, N.J. Over two summers with Alan's aristocratic family, first at Deer Park, then in St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, France, near Nice, the fledgling writer glimpsed for the first time "some ancient, measureless way of living." Upon graduating, he returned to Europe with his wife and two 12-year-olds he would tutor for the summer in the south of France. Merwin (The Ends of the Earth
) is best at succinct, decisive cameos: characters enter his enchanted sphere, then vanish, such as the visiting young Samuel Beckett, memorable for the exquisite fineness of his cucumber slicing. Purposefully incomplete, occasionally frustrating, Merwin's book traces lost worlds.

September 1, 2005
Pulitzer Prize winner Merwin ("The Carrier of Ladders"), who grew up in Scranton, PA, under a fearsome minister father, was determined at an early age to find his freedom by moving away from home and becoming a poet. In this memoir, he recounts those rambling years of his youth. At Princeton, which he attended on a working scholarship, Merwin was mentored by two professors who introduced him to the worlds of literature and poetry. His friendship with a fellow student led to an introduction to his future guardian, and through this connection he was able to travel to Europe and live in a villa on the French Riviera for a summer. Here he was exposed to a type of existence altogether different from the one to which he'd been accustomed. In recollecting his adventures, Merwin adopts a lyrical style, vividly evoking memories of locales and situations. Readers will grow with him and feel, as he did, that a provincial can indeed become a poet. Highly recommended for all libraries. -Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2005
Each of the 100-plus poems in Merwin's meditative, playful, and lithely beautiful new collection, which closely follows the remarkable retrospective volume " Migrations "(2005), begins with the word " To" and directly addresses some aspect of nature or the self, a feeling or an idea, a person, place, or moment. Merwin keeps his language simple but his perceptions complex. Classical in their lines of inquiry and restraint yet vital in their attunement to the here and now, these personal odes and musings on daily existence and the cycles of life are, by turns, bemused and exalted. As Merwin moves from contemplating his reflection in the mirror to musing over memory, grief, duty, absence, purity, and the splendor of the earth, the subtle, wavelike motion generated by each poem infuses the collection with buoyancy and light.

Merwin is as refined and entrancing a prose stylist as he is a poet. Earlier works chronicle his experiences in France and Hawaii. In " Summer Doorways," he circles further back in time to tell amusing and piquant stories of his years at Princeton during World War II, and of summers in the country that stoked his sense of wonder and mystery. Chance acquaintances led to Merwin's becoming a tutor to privileged boys in beautiful settings, including Genoa and Portugal. His splendidly detailed and sensuous descriptions (what a memory he has), especially of postwar Europe, are redolent in mood and precious historically. And he takes great pleasure in turning intriguing, exquisitely crafted portraits and anecdotes into lustrous recollections that capture lost time and trace the making of a poet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)