And welcome on behalf of the Poetry Center.
This is the first event of the series this year.
We're delighted that you're all here.
And we hope that this will be a particularly stellar series
for you.
Some of the other authors we have coming this fall
include the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun
and the much-loved Lucille Clifton.
In the spring, we'll be bringing Junot Díaz, August Kleinzahler,
and Jorie Graham among others.
I would like to let you know that the U of A Bookstore
is here tonight with W.S. Merwin's books,
including the brand new book, The Folding Cliffs.
We're particularly grateful that [INAUDIBLE]
has been able to get the book for us
since its official pub date isn't until October 13.
And we also have a number of the earlier works as well.
And I'm sure the author will be happy to sign the books for you
after the reading.
Tonight's reading is sponsored by the Friends of the Poetry
Center, our individual donors, many of whom are here tonight.
We thank you and urge you to continue supporting our efforts
as generously as you can.
If you'd like to be on our mailing list
to find out about other events, you can sign up outside next
to the book table afterwards.
I have spent most of the last three days
reading W.S. Merwin's new book, The Folding Cliffs,
and it has been a remarkable experience.
So I'm very happy and honored that we're all here
tonight to celebrate with him the publication
of this major new work.
Merwin's first book, A Mask for Janus, was chosen by W.H. Auden
for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952.
The Folding Cliffs is his 16th collection of poetry.
He's also written plays, one of which,
The Darkling Child, was produced in London in 1956,
four works of prose, including in 1992, The Lost Upland,
set in southwestern France, and one of only nine books
selected for the New York Times list of best books in 1992.
He's translated widely for many languages, most significantly,
the great national epics of French and Spanish literature,
The Song of Roland and The Poem of the Cid.
His honors are many, including the Pulitzer Prize,
the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize,
and the Governor's Award for Literature
from the state of Hawaii.
Of his poetry, it is perhaps the work of the second four books
that is best known and most widely loved.
The intensely compacted poems of cool radiance,
to borrow the description given by Richard Howard of the books
originally published between 1963 and '73, The Moving Target,
The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders and Writings
to an Unfinished Accompaniment.
Those books now available in one volume from Copper Canyon.
But in recent books, Travels and The Vixen,
the poems have expanded to honor the importance of story
and to encompass a deep historical perspective.
That impulse now comes to fruition
in the extraordinary work The Folding Cliffs, a narrative
of 19th century Hawaii.
This book reads like a great novel,
telling the story of one family's flight
into the wilds of Kauai in order to survive
the efforts of the provisional government and its soldiers
to arrest and isolate victims of leprosy.
This very human story is set within a sense of time
that encompasses the entire natural and cultural evolution
of the Hawaiian Islands.
And while it has the thematic density and weight of a novel,
it has the music and lushness of language,
the strangely riveting tensions in the lines,
and the spiritual hunger of great poetry.
John Hollander has described The Folding Cliffs
as a powerful revisionary telling of a powerful story that
makes of a far-flung corner of American geography and history
a central event for our national culture.
The book is a gift to our understanding of ourselves
as tragic, natural, and cultural beings.
And it is a gift to the art of poetry
in demonstrating that after all of the unravelings
of the 20th century, poetry can still
rise to the task of telling a great and luminous story.
Please welcome W.S. Merwin.