Emblems of a Season of Fury

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, shows in this volume a deep and painful awareness of the problems of the world beyond his monastery walls. Merton said that the twentieth century man who has not meditated on Auschwitz does not yet know the meaning of meditation of the meaning of his own times. These poems are often points for such meditation. "Chants for a Site With Furnaces" combines ironic understatement with parody of the stereotypes commonly used to justify such massive crimes against humanity. Along with these "emblems" of nuclear-age pathology are elegies for Hemingway and Thurber, religious and metaphysical poems of contemplative life and a long prose "Letter" on the Cold War. In addition, there is a section of translations from the works of Vallejo (Peru), Carrera Andrade (Ecuador), Cuadra, Cardenal, and Cortes (Nicaragua), and a selection of mystical poems by Raissa Maritain, wife of the Thomist philosopher.