In a career spanning five decades, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read — and imitated — poets in America. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval—influenced somewhat by Robert Graves and the medieval poetry he was then translating — to a more distinctly American voice, following his two years in Boston where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall, all of whom were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s. W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic and full of an intimate awareness of the natural world.

His first book, A Mask for Janus, was chosen by W.H. Auden in 1952 for the Yale Younger Poets series. His book of poems The Carrier of Ladders was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. His other books of poems include The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice, Flower & Hand, The Compass Flower, Feathers from the Hill, Opening the Hand, The Rain in the Trees, Travels, The Vixen, The Lost Upland, Unframed Originals, and The Folding Cliffs. His recent works include the collections of poems The River Sound and The Pupil, as well as a new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio and his critically-lauded translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has also published a book of prose entitled The Mays of Ventadorn, as part of the National Geographic Directions series. Recent reissues of his books include The First Four Books of Poems, and his translations of Jean Follain’s poems Transparence of the World, and Antonio Porchia’s Voices. n 2004, Shoemaker & Hoard released The Ends of the Earth, a gathering of essays expressing the breadth of W.S. Merwin’s fascination with the natural world and the explorers who have journeyed through it. His more recent book of poems is Present Company (Copper Canyon Press). A memoir entitled Summer Doorways (Shoemaker & Hoard) was published in September 2005 (Paperback, June 2007). His volume of selected poems Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 (Copper Canyon Press) was published in 2005 (paperback, September 2007). The Book of Fables, a reissue of two previously published books The Miner’s Pale Children and Houses & Travelers, was published by Copper Canyon in July 2007. An upcoming volume of poetry, entitled Shadow of Sirius, will be published by Copper Canyon in fall 2008.

In 1999, W.S. Merwin was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for a jointly-held position along with poets Rita Dove and Louise Glück. Included in his numerous awards are the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In the fall of 2004, Merwin received the 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2005, he was honored as laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia, receiving the international poetry award, the Golden Wreath Award. His book Migration: Selected Poems 1951 – 2001 was also selected as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. Migration the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry, and was also named winner of the 2006 Ambassador Book Award for Poetry. W.S. Merwin was awarded the 2006 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for his book Present Company. He lives, writes, and gardens in Hawaii, on the island of Maui.

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“The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.”

— The Atlantic Monthly