The Changing Light at Sandover: Review

by Robert Polito

A 560-page poem about the other world drawn from some 25 years of conversing with spirits at the Ouija board, James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" inevitably calibrates among the strangest performances in American literature. But what else is new? From Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville through Stein, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Hart Crane and Zukofsky, the instigators of the American tradition (or is it anti-tradition?) have inclined toward the idiosyncratic, the sui generis, maybe also the crackpot. Think of "Moby-Dick," "The Bridge," "Patterson" and "The Cantos." Originally published in three parts — "The Book of Ephraim" (1976), "Mirabell: Books of Number" (1978) and "Scripts for the Pageant" (1980) — "Sandover" first appeared in a single volume in 1982. To revisit it now, newly reissued in an exquisite edition edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser on the occasion of what would have been the poet's 80th birthday, is to confront a poem as daring, ambitious and necessary as any of these other prodigious American landmarks.

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