Volume 42, Number 8 · May 11, 1995
Chronicles of Love and Loss
By Helen Vendler
A Scattering of Salts
by James Merrill
Knopf, 96 pp., $20.00
James Merrill, who died on February 6 of this year, gave his last volume the title A Scattering of Salts. In such a phrase there are overtones of tears, savors, and fragrances, yet with a clear implication, too, that these astringent crystals are scattered at intervals in the diffuse and oceanic medium of life. Merrill, for all the poignancy of his work, was a comic poet in the line of Pope and Byron and Auden; and from the very beginning of his long career, the poems he published combined, in sparkling ways, suffering and joy.
Review, 6219 words
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