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“... The saxophonist winds up ‘My Romance’, the song with a scar. In the red lacquer ceiling, the night’s raw throat, I can just make out lampshades the colour of a smoker’s breath. One is at our table. Across sits a woman in tiny furs from before the war, the mouth of one gnawing on the tail of the other, like comets. A sudden brightness on stage, a flaring spot, flashes on the nodding brass ...”

“... This Collected Poems is not a ‘Complete Poetry’. It omits Merrill’s trilogy of book-length poems, The Changing Light at Sandover, as well as a number of uncollected or unpublished poems. The notes are minimal. Merrill died in 1995: the editors of this volume, who are also his literary executors, apparently decided to publish a reader’s edition in short order ...”

“... from the last ten years that probably marks a diminuendo as much as a revival – only J.D. McClatchy’s makes any sort of effort to represent him in his fullness and variety, with a clutch of poems, a couple of stories, some essays, the first scene from Der Rosenkavalier, and two plays: that comedy, Der Schwierige, and the risible late tragedy ‘The ...”

“... accent became English, or almost English. In an interview in the Paris Review in 1988 he told J.D. McClatchy: ‘I suppose my voice must sound affected in some way … Doubtless it’s a mask of some sort; a fear or shame of something, very likely of being Jewish, a matter I am no longer in the least ashamed of, though once it was a painful ...”

“... not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of Ming Dynasty black lacquer furniture with mother-of-pearl inlays, and flowering begonias painted on, along with birds ...”