The Changing Light at Sandover: A Poem - Tapa dura

A series of mystical poems explores the author's experiences communicating through a Ouija board with a spirit named Ephraim who guides the poet through a series of conversations with W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, and others.

James Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, in New York City and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser are James Merrill’s literary executors. J. D. McClatchy has published six volumes of poetry and three collections of essays. He teaches at Yale, where he also edits The Yale Review. Stephen Yenser has written three books of criticism (one about Merrill) and two volumes of poems. He is a professor of English and the director of Creative Writing at UCLA.