Menu
Top of the pile
80
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
94/100Critics
65/100Scholars
Author:
James Merrill, Langdon Hammer, Stephen Yenser
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
April 6, 2021
Poet James Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss.
What The Reviewers Say
A cosmopolitan, bejeweled and philosophical chronicle of friendship, love, sex and work.
This book, which takes us from age 6 (a letter to Santa Claus) all the way to his final days in Tucson, Ariz., where he died from AIDS-related complications in 1995, immerses us in that world and enriches our understanding of the poetry that came out of it.
What emerges most strongly from the letters collected in A Whole World is their lightness of touch, lightness of spirit, and the quality of affection on display.
One of the immediate rewards of reading his letters is to find, embedded in otherwise newsy or purely conversational letters, passages of great painterly beauty.
