James Merrill, Ed. by Stephen Yenser and Langdon Hammer
RaveThe Hudson ReviewOne of the immediate rewards of reading his letters is to find, embedded in otherwise newsy or purely conversational letters, passages of great painterly beauty ... No other letter offers such an extended theatrical entertainment as [the one about Wallace Stevens\'s birthday party], but a great many of them include a similar, more compressed form of it: the anecdote. Anecdotes are always told to illustrate a point concisely, but they require a certain amount of characterization, a particular setting or occasion, and a crucial moment of drama—or even epiphany, if you like—that depends on something spoken ... the letters should be read for their immediate emotions: their generosity, affection, empathy, and love, their readiness to entertain, and their unfailing eagerness to please. You don’t have to re-read the poetry in order to understand them—rudimentary footnotes follow each letter, identifying anything you need to know (and much that you don’t). In any case, Merrill himself is far easier of access in these letters than he is in his (nuanced, paradoxical, self-revising, elusive) poems. He writes letters not to perform, never to impress, always to communicate with and respond to a person he cares about greatly.
