In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems

By Thomas Merton, Lynn R. Szabo, Lynn R Szabo

A new, broad, comprehensive view of the innovative poetry of the late, great Trappist monk and religious philosopher Thomas Merton. Poet, Trappist monk, religious philosopher, translator, social criticthe late Thomas Merton was all these things. Until now, no selection from his great body of poetry has afforded a comprehensive view of his varied and largely innovative work. In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton is not only double the size of Merton's earlier Selected Poems (1967), it also arranges his poetry thematically and chronologically, so that readers can follow the poet's multifarious interrelated lines of thought as well as his poetic development over the decades, from his college days in the 1930s to his untimely accidental death in Bangkok in 1968 during his personal Eastern pilgrimage. The selections are grouped under eight thematic headings"Geography's Landscapes," "Poems from the Monastery," "Poems of the Sacred," "Songs of Contemplation," "History's Voices: Past and Present," "Engaging the World," "On Being Human," "Merton and Other Languages."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811216136
• ISBN13: 9780811216135
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Exotic Bait for a Suburban Afternoon

It was time for a new selection of Merton's poetry, and certainly this set can be safely recommended to those coming into an engagement with him. A liberal selection of some of Merton's very best poems are here, in a handsome volume with generally relevant introductory commentary. However, this selection misses the mark for various reasons. Most of all, neither Merton's entire poetic corpus, nor individual poems can be as readily tagged and filed as the editor attempts -- contemplative poems, historical subjects, "being human," and the like. And given the major directions of Merton's pioneer aesthetic, it is highly debatable whether they should be. He was one to cross and demolish categories, not erect them. Merton's early poems suggest an offshoot of, or an updated incarnation of Gerald Manley Hopkins, to make allowances for the more freewheeling engagement with both self and the world expected in a later 20th century voice. Thus three categories -- "from the monastery," "of the sacred," "of contemplation" esentially recycle and relabel material from the same well. Without doubt the selections are very good and represent important currents in Merton's poetry which never ceased. Yet by setting up the cloister as "base," the editors implicitly establish inside/outside monastery/world Cistersian/self dichotomies which for the most part of his life (except for a few years in the flush of solace early in his vocation), Merton not only rejected but quite determinedly attacked. Indeed this is his achievement. This attack was what the later experimental poetry extended. Merton was virtually alone as a Catholic or even a spiritual writer to delve into the modernist experimentalism of Pound and the early Eliot. This is what entitles him, if anything, to be considered a significant figure in 20th century poetry. Parts of those late experiments, which he called "antipoems" -- Cables to the Ace and Geography of Lograire -- are included here, to set this book apart from the earlier Selected Poems collection. It is a worthy aim, however since these works are long they are excerpted. Since, however strange, these poems have a hidden but tight unity, excerpting does not really work. The holes invisibly show, making the remainder that is published just look disjointed for the wrong reasons. What is really new in this set (at least for the general public) is the "being human" section -- which is one way to look at the poems to the so-called girlfriend (or what have you) known to Mertonphobes the world over sometimes as S, other times as M, but in any event wearing an official Merton industry scarlet letter worthy of a Hawthorne romance. Frankly, while the poems now finally largely revealed are not that bad, they are not really (as poems) all that good either. They look like they were dashed off about as fast as the much more successful "Kandy Express" in the Asian Journal. No, you can't fault Merton, either -- writing about love and passion is