Richie Hofmann Reads The Book of Ephraim

Readers unfamiliar with James Merrill's Book of Ephraim may want to nosedive into Richie Hofmann's article at the Los Angeles Review of Books, which explores a new edition of Merrill's book-length poem. "The very best of the poetry of James Merrill — dazzling formal range; mandarin wit and lowbrow jokes; the sense that an entire world can inhibit a work of art, populated with fascinating people, gorgeous and curious objects, facts and stories with their own histories and intimacies — is to be found in The Book of Ephraim," Hofmann writes. From there: 

In the poem, Merrill memorably summons the “Voices from the Other World.” It is the poem that made me want to write poems. Though I first encountered the poem as a college student (it was given as a gift to me by a favorite mentor) a decade after Merrill had died, I felt that his spirit could be felt in these lines, that his voice, too, was itself revived and was speaking to me.

First published in his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Divine Comedies (1976), The Book of Ephraim intersperses the transcripts of Merrill’s communications with the spirit world, the voices of the dead rendered through small capital letters, with Merrill’s narrative. The poet comes to understand the meaning of all the years he spends at the “milk glass tabletop” in the dining room of his apartment in Stonington, Connecticut, with his partner, David Noyes Jackson, “playing” at a handmade Ouija board, using the willowware cup (the subject of one of Merrill’s finest short poems) to transcribe the messages of the dead.

Learn more at Los Angeles Review of Books.