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A world unto itself, which has existed almost unchanged since medieval times, the theocratic state of Athos is a spiritual haven which stands in dramatic counterpoint to the contemporary world. Even time is calculated differently here – Athos rejects the Julian calendar and clocks are reset every day to Byzantine time – midnight falls at sunset.             Christopher Merrill travelled to Mount Athos in search of spiritual renewal and a vision of eternity. At this unique intersection of modernity and Biblical tradition he discovered not only the enduring value of faith but also how much Athos has to teach us about the contemplative life, and found that eternity is located in the here and now.             Journey to the Holy Mountain is a book rooted in spiritual crisis, which explores a route to salvation hitherto undocumented in a mainstream Western context. Out of spiritual desolation Merrill came to a deepening sense of the religious life, learning to recognize what have been described as 'the distinctive challenges and calls' of each monastic hour.             The world of Mount Athos is closely guarded against intrusion by monk-policemen: no women, or even female animals, are allowed on Athos and the number of visitors is severely restricted. 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As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Merrill began to compose a self-portrait alongside this tree whose lifespan is comparable to a human's and that, from an early age, he's regarded as a talisman.  Dogwoods have never been far from Merrill's view at significant moments throughout his life, helping to shape his understanding of place in the great chain of being; entwined in his experience is the conviction that our relationship to the natural world is central to our walk in the sun. The feeling of a connection to nature has become more acute as his life has taken him to distant corners of the earth, often to war zones where he has witnessed not only humankind's propensity for violence and evil but also the enduring power of connections that can be forged across languages, borders, and politics. Dogwoods teach us persistence humility and wonder. Self-Portrait with Dogwood is no ordinary memoir, but rather the work of a traveler who has crisscrossed the country and the globe in search of ways to make sense of his time here. Merrill provides new ways of thinking about personal history, the environment, politics, faith, and the power of the written word. In his descriptions of places far and near, many outside of the average American's purview--a besieged city in Bosnia, a hidden path in a Taiwanese park, Tolstoy's country house in Russia, a castle in Slovakia, a blossoming dogwood at daybreak in Seattle--the reader's understanding of the world will flourish as well.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50383799714065,"sku":"CIN1595348093G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50393414238481,"sku":"CIN1595348093VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52688925163793,"sku":"NLS9781595348098","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52752538763537,"sku":"NIN9781595348098","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1595348093.jpg?v=1751151092"},{"product_id":"flares-book-christopher-merrill-9781945680465","title":"Flares","description":"The richly imagined fables, vignettes, and prose poems of Flares reveal the elementary strangeness of this world. Here is the improvised travel record of a poet haunted by history, who documents what he discovers in foreign lands with an exacting and hallucinatory eye. Composed in transit, on diplomatic missions to scores of countries, Flares will endure in the reader’s imagination as a series of signals in the night, illuminating the hidden corners of our time here on earth.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50402823766289,"sku":"CIN1945680466G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50402825044241,"sku":"CIN1945680466VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51053885849873,"sku":"NIN9781945680465","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52677974720785,"sku":"NLS9781945680465","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1945680466.jpg?v=1751348794"},{"product_id":"grass-of-another-country-book-christopher-merrill-9780805035919","title":"Grass of Another Country","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50412618776849,"sku":"CIN0805035915G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51765056209169,"sku":"CIN0805035915VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0805035915.jpg?v=1750946195"},{"product_id":"grass-of-another-country-book-christopher-merrill-9780805027716","title":"The Grass of Another Country","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50457883771153,"sku":"CIN0805027718VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50763082170641,"sku":"CIN0805027718G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0805027718.jpg?v=1750818831"},{"product_id":"only-the-nails-remain-book-christopher-merrill-9780805030495","title":"Only the Nails Remain","description":"George K. Karos I was born and raised in Martinsburg, West Virginia, United States. He attended public schools until the completion of seventh grade. He then attended and graduated from Saint James School, located in Washington County, Maryland. He received his Bachelor of Arts from West Virginia University in 1991, and his Master of Arts from American University in 1999. For over two decades, George has studied, performed, and worked with numerous arts projects, musical collaborations, and arts-related organizations facilitating various art-mediums and expression as a poet, a magazine columnist and poetry editor, lead singer for rock bands, performance artist, and folk singer. As a solo artist\/acoustic guitarist and songwriter, he has toured and performed in musical venues throughout The USA with an emphasis on the regions of his Mid-Atlantic roots. Over the last 20 years, he has had three books of poetry published by Red Dragon Press, been published in over 60 national and international literary publications and included in the Grace Calvelieri Collection donated to the Gelman Library of George Washington University. He has also performed solo performance art works in both improvisational settings in regional art spaces and original music festivals with nationally known artists and music groups. He currently lives in Central where he continues to write record poetry and music, tour, and perform his acoustic music infused with poetry. In this his fourth book, He presents a selection of both new and selected poems.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50475088838929,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50475089330449,"sku":"CIN0805030492VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0805030492.jpg?v=1751043879"},{"product_id":"necessities-book-christopher-merrill-9781935210467","title":"Necessities","description":"\"Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinary rich generation. His range of sympathy, subject, and tone has always been prodigious.\"--W. S. Merwin  Necessities is a meditation on the deepest promptings of the spirit that could be discovered through language. Influenced by his reading of Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other explorers of the marvelous, these poems are parables, which deepen with each reading.  Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, more than a dozen edited volumes and books of translations, and five works of nonfiction. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697737437457,"sku":"NGR9781935210467","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52478732534033,"sku":"NLS9781935210467","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1935210467.jpg?v=1751156408"},{"product_id":"things-of-the-hidden-god-book-christopher-merrill-9781498292528","title":"Things of the Hidden God","description":"If I had learned anything during the war, it was that our walk in the sun is brief, and so I resolved to wander from monastery to monastery, a sojourner in the world of last things. \u003cbr\u003eSo poet and journalist Christopher Merrill tells us near the beginning of this gripping account of the transforming pilgrimages he made to Mount Athos, in Greece, in the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It was time for me to come to terms with the way my life had turned out: the love I had squandered, the misgivings I had about my vocation and my faith, the dread I felt at every turn. \u003cbr\u003eIn despair and out of a longing to end his spiritual desolation, Merrill became one of a handful of visitors permitted entry to Mount Athos-a mysterious land that for more than a thousand years has been the secret heart of the Eastern Orthodox Church. There, amid the beautiful terrain, the ancient rhythms, and the spiritual rigor of this holy place, he found a haven in dramatic contrast to the rest of the world. \u003cbr\u003e As Merrill's story unfolds, we, too, hike the rough trails of Athos, exploring a place and a way of life scarcely altered since medieval times. We share encounters with monks, wolves, and spiritual seekers; visit Athos's twenty monasteries, where exquisite art treasures are sequestered; make our way to lonely hermitages that clutch the cliffs above the sea. And like Merrill, we come to consider existence in a new and different light. \u003cbr\u003ePart journal of personal discovery, part meditation upon the history and traditions of the contemplative life, Things of the Hidden God takes us where the temporal and the eternal intersect, where community and solitude coexist, and where centuries-oldpractices provide insight for how to live today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51030520889617,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51030523347217,"sku":"NIN9781498292528","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52593540628753,"sku":"NLS9781498292528","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1498292526.jpg?v=1751054128"},{"product_id":"after-the-fact-book-christopher-merrill-9781945680724","title":"After The Fact","description":"A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences.  The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.  Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other—and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future—which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51053957513489,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51053960069393,"sku":"NIN9781945680724","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51698960302353,"sku":"CIN1945680725VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52663986159889,"sku":"NLS9781945680724","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1945680725.jpg?v=1751282903"},{"product_id":"boat-book-christopher-merrill-9781936797387","title":"Boat","description":"Like Neruda and Paz, Perse and Milosz, Christopher Merrill is both a writer and a cultural envoy, crisscrossing the globe as chronicler and courier. Boat records a series of passages over a decade, employing varied formal strategies: meditations and fantasias, prose poems and versets, lyric sequences and narratives, translations and ghazals. Composed in war zones and embassies, refugee camps and monasteries, Boat is a logbook tracking questions of memory, the body and body politic, faith, mortality, and the ways of knowledge moves through generations. Reflecting ten years of life on the wing and forty years of writing, including extensive translation from other languages, Boat bears witness to what Merrill has heard and seen in places most Americans will never visit.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51201976434961,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51201977090321,"sku":"NGR9781936797387","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1936797380.jpg?v=1751250731"},{"product_id":"only-the-nails-remain-book-christopher-merrill-9780742516861","title":"Only the Nails Remain","description":"Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars is a chronicle of poet and critic Christopher Merrill's ten war-time journeys to the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. At once a travelogue, a book of war reportage, and a biography of the imagination under siege, this beautifully written and personal narrative takes the reader along on the author's journeys to all the provinces and republics of the former Yugoslavia-Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina-as well as to Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey. His journeys provide the narrative structure for an exploration of the roles and responsibility of intellectuals caught up in a decisive historical moment, many of whom either helped to incite the war or else bore eloquent witness to its carnage. What separates this book-the first non-native literary work on the conflict-from other collections of reportage, political analysis, and polemic, is its concern for capturing the texture of particular places in the midst of dramatic change-the sounds and sights and smells, the stories and observations of victim and perpetrator alike, the culture of war. Here is a literary meditation on war, a fascinating portrait of the poetry, politics and the people of the Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and future of those war-torn lands. Hear an interview with the author on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered, February 20th, 'Balkan Poets.'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52450871181585,"sku":"NLS9780742516861","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780742516861.jpg?v=1779962732"},{"product_id":"only-the-nails-remain-book-christopher-merrill-9780847698202","title":"Only the Nails Remain","description":"Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars is a chronicle of poet and critic Christopher Merrill's ten war-time journeys to the Balkans from the years 1992 through 1996. 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What separates this book-the first non-native literary work on the conflict-from other collections of reportage, political analysis, and polemic, is its concern for capturing the texture of particular places in the midst of dramatic change-the sounds and sights and smells, the stories and observations of victim and perpetrator alike, the culture of war. Here is a literary meditation on war, a fascinating portrait of the poetry, politics and the people of the Balkans that will provide insight into the past, present, and future of those war-torn lands. 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From jungle to desert to sea, from cities to ruins, he explores how history is shaped by ceremonies, expeditions, and wars. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe observes the performance of a banned ritual in Malaysia, retraces Saint-John Perse's epic journey from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, and tours the Levant in the wake of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Encountering a wide range of people along the way--artists and politicians, soldiers and refugees--Merrill is as attentive to their individuality as he is attuned to the historical, social, and cultural situations in which they find themselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn three extended essays, he poses fundamental but nonetheless provocative questions­­--Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do?--which lead him to conclude that the changes we are witnessing now presage the end of one order and the creation of another.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLively and insightful, empathetic and illuminating, \u003cem\u003eThe Tree of the Doves\u003c\/em\u003e is an important book, as contemporary as it is timeless.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52752514220305,"sku":"NIN9781571313058","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781571313058.jpg?v=1763561798"},{"product_id":"after-the-fact-scripts-postscripts-book-christopher-merrill-9781935210887","title":"After The Fact: Scripts \u0026 Postscripts","description":"\"Prose was always meant for colloquy, risk, and intimacy. With these rich and conversant prose poems, Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill return spoken language to sport--sometimes competitive, but often cooperative, exploratory, even humanely probative. What is a friend? Bell and Merrill demonstrate friendship is drawn from imagination.\"--Stephen Kuusisto, author of Letters to Borges \"The best conversationalists intuit and respond to unspoken questions and interstitial meanings, sidelong concerns and secret subjects. They also know how to listen to another's story and hear the line or inflection that calls forth their own tale in a way that enlarges, well, everything. Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill's stunning epistolary paragraphs illustrate the inner workings of just such an intimate, agile, and sustained conversation. This collaborative, high wire act offers up profound truths in exactly the way the most exciting poems take shape--by leaps of imagination and complete trust in the power of association to bring up riches, songs, and wisdom from the depths.\"--Lia Purpura  After the Fact is a lively and imaginative conversation between two legendary poets. Marvin Bell, writing from Iowa City and Port Townsend, and Christopher Merrill, writing from around the world, give us an intimate look into collaboration at its best. Christopher Merrill's recent books include Boat and Necessities. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.  Marvin Bell's works include collaborations with poet William Stafford and volumes of an original poetic form, most recently collected in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52756870988049,"sku":"NIN9781935210887","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820945633553,"sku":"NLS9781935210887","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781935210887.jpg?v=1763577184"},{"product_id":"on-the-road-to-lviv-book-christopher-merrill-9798987924136","title":"On the Road to Lviv","description":"\u003cp\u003ePrismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. This chronicle\/ Took shape the day the war began, which was\/ My 65th birthday, writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem's speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a democratic-minded Westerner determined to develop\/ Civil societies around the world. Not since Byron's Mazeppa\u0026gt;has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray's masterly translation into Ukrainian.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53348584423697,"sku":"GOR014865851","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53634413134097,"sku":"NLS9798987924136","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798987924136.jpg?v=1774609591"},{"product_id":"georgia-o-keeffe-as-icon-book-christopher-merrill-9780826318343","title":"Georgia O'Keeffe as Icon","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53480521040145,"sku":"CIN0826318347G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53618110431505,"sku":"CIN0826318347A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780826318343.jpg?v=1777548638"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-christopher-merrill.oembed?page=2","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}