The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative

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Knopf, 1998 - Poetry - 331 pages
From a major American poet--a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii. The story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers.
A brilliant capturing--inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands--of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through the exploitative incursions of Europeans and Americans. An epic narrative that enthralls with the grandeur of its language and of its vision.

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About the author (1998)

W. S. Merwin was born William Stanley Merwin in New York City on September 30, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1948 and did some graduate work there in Romance languages. He worked as a tutor and translator while writing poetry. In 1952, his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He wrote numerous collections of poetry including Green with Beasts, The Moving Target, The Lice, The Compass Flower, The Rain in the Trees, The River Sound, The Moon Before Morning, and Garden Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders and in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, the National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Vixen. He also published essays, short fiction, memoirs, and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, and Osip Mandelstam. Merwin's other works included Unframed Originals, The Lost Upland, The Ends of the Earth, and Summer Doorways. He also received the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Tanning Prize and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He died on March 15, 2019 at the age of 91.

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