Divine Comedies Poems Author:James Ingram Merrill "Divine Comedies is ... an American book that dares everything in order to achieve what Emerson called the essential American trope of power: surprise. The book's nine shorter poems surpass nearly all the earlier Merrill, but its apocalypse (a lesser word won't do) is a 100-page verse-tale, The Book of Ephraim... more »>, an occult splendor in which Merrill rivals Yeats' A Vision, Stevens' ghostly The Owl in theSarcophagus, and even some aspects of Proust. I don't know that The Book of Ephraim, at least after some dozen readings, can be over-praised, as nothing since the greatest writers of our century equals them in daemonic force ... the poetic results [of Merrill's occult journey], should they equal or go beyond The Book of Ephraim, will make him the strangest, the most unnerving of all this country's great poets." Harold Bloom, The New Republic.« less