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Boat
Poems
Christopher Merrill
Tupelo Press, 2013
Like Neruda and Paz, Perse and Milosz, Christopher Merrill is both a writer and a cultural envoy, crisscrossing the globe as chronicler and courier. Boat records a series of passages over a decade, employing varied formal strategies: meditations and fantasias, prose poems and versets, lyric sequences and narratives, translations and ghazals. Composed in war zones and embassies, refugee camps and monasteries, Boat is a logbook tracking questions of memory, the body and body politic, faith, mortality, and the ways of knowledge moves through generations. Reflecting ten years of life on the wing and forty years of writing, including extensive translation from other languages, Boat bears witness to what Merrill has heard and seen in places most Americans will never visit.
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"The Million Dead, Too, Summ'd Up"
Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings
Walt Whitman
University of Iowa Press, 2021
This book is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry and prose with a full commentary on each work. Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill carry on a dialogue with Whitman (and with each other) as they invite readers to trace how Whitman’s writing about the Civil War develops, shifts, and manifests itself in different genres throughout the years of the war. The book offers forty selections of Whitman’s war writings, including not only the well-known war poems but also his prose and personal letters. Each are followed by Folsom’s critical examination and then by Merrill’s afterword, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about the selection.

The real democratic reader, Whitman said, “must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work,” because what is needed for democracy to flourish is “a nation of supple and athletic minds.” Folsom and Merrill model this kind of active reading and encourage both seasoned and new readers of Whitman’s war writings to enter into the challenging and exhilarating mode of talking back to Whitman, arguing with him, and learning from him.
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Song of Myself
With a Complete Commentary
Walt Whitman
University of Iowa Press, 2016
This book offers the most comprehensive and detailed reading to date of Song of Myself. One of the most distinguished critics in Whitman Studies, Ed Folsom, and one of the nation’s most prominent writers and literary figures, Christopher Merrill, carry on a dialog with Whitman, and with each other, section by section, as they invite readers to enter into the conversation about how the poem develops, moves, improvises, and surprises. Instead of picking and choosing particular passages to support a reading of the poem, Folsom and Merrill take Whitman at his word and interact with “every atom” of his work. The book presents Whitman’s final version of the poem, arranged in fifty-two sections; each section is followed by Folsom’s detailed critical examination of the passage, and then Merrill offers a poet’s perspective, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about both the passage in question and the entire poem.
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The Way to the Salt Marsh
A John Hay Reader
John Hay
Brandeis University Press, 1998
"In common things are greater extensions of ourselves than we ever conceived of." "Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult," observes John Hay, naturalist, essayist, sage, and inveterate walker of byways. This collection from the 50-year long career of America's preeminent nature writer illustrates the full range of Hay's work. An elegant and lyrical stylist, he is, in Merrill's words, "the nature writer's writer, an illustrator of the Emersonian notion that 'the world is emblematic.'" And so Hay reveals the ubiquitous but often unnoticed emblems all around us. The mad, impossible rush of alewives flinging themselves upstream to mate, for example, represents "the drive to be, a common and terrible sending out, to which men are also bound in helplessness." In the migratory movements of the terns and the green turtles past his beloved Cape Cod Hay sees the mystery and magnificence of homing: "To know your direction and return through outer signs, is as new as it is ancient. We are still people of the planet, with all its original directions waiting in our being." Whether describing the rugosa or bayberry of a sand dune, the plight of stranded pilot whales, or a spider swinging on its gossamer, Hay encourages us to enlarge our inner universe by observing, appreciating, and preserving the outer one we so often ignore. As a result, he says, "we may find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us," and by recognizing our "deep alliance with natural forces we find a new depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living things."
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