James Merrill once called his poetic works 'chronicles of love and loss', and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his life - comic and haunting, exotic and domestic - to shape a compelling, sometimes intensely moving, personal portrait.Sophisticated, witty and ironic, his poetry also engages passionately with topical issues - war, terrorism, political corruption, AIDS, climate change and the destruction of nature.An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and W.H. Auden, Merrill, like them, has left a legacy that will speak to readers for years to come.