Summer doorways

by W. S. Merwin

"In 1948, twenty-one, already married and graduated from Princeton, W.S. Merwin made his first trip abroad." "Summer Doorways tells the story of the poet's youth a few years before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952: Merwin describes life in a Europe that was already passing away at the close of World War II. He writes, "I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, at once fixed and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone like a summer." Writing both lyrical and longing, Summer Doorways is certain to be placed high on the list of this writer's most important works."--Jacket.