Copper Canyon Press (paperback, 2019)
Publisher Marketing: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. S. Merwin turns his mastery of language and powerful attention to the origins of twelfth-century Provençal troubadours. Merwin deftly blends personal anecdotes--his pilgrimage at the age of eighteen to visit Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's hospital, his purchase of an abandoned farmhouse in Quercy--with his exploration of Southern France's rich history and linguistic heritage.
We sat in a tower of the old library building, a long room among the rafters, a kind of loft that had never been finished like the rooms on the floors below, so that our graceless attempts at giving voice to a few sounds and phrases of medieval French took place inside masonry that had been designed to resemble a fortified belfry or a keep with battlements.
