The Ends of the Earth: Essays.

In his poetry, which is treasured the world over, distinguished man of letters Merwin is profoundly attentive to the sensuousness of place and to the way places change over time. These keen interests also inform his essays, and in his first prose collection since The Lost Upland (1992), he adroitly interleaves natural and human history. A shared love of the sea instigated a friendship between Merwin and George Kirstein, former publisher of the Nation, and the ocean seems to shape Merwin's gloriously rolling and rhythmic sentences as he profiles his late friend, as well as Sydney Parkinson--an artist onboard Captain James Cook's first circumnavigation of the earth who inspires Merwin to reflect on our attempts to name and order the natural world--and the French explorer Jean-Francois Galaup de La Perouse, the first European to explore Hawaii. Merwin also vividly chronicles the circumstances currently endangering the flora and fauna of Hawaii and the Mexican wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly.