Product Description

From a major American poet -- a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii. The story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers.

A brilliant capturing -- inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands -- of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through the exploitative incursions of Europeans and Americans. An epic narrative that enthralls with the grandeur of its language and of its vision.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #724176 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-28
• Released on: 2000-03-28
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Since distinguished poet and translator Merwin (The Lice; The Vixen) moved to Maui almost two decades ago, Hawaiian flora, fauna and history have pervaded his work. His sprawling new novel-in-verse (based on historical facts) unfolds a complicated, suspenseful, true story of natives, colonials, rebels and leprosy in 19th-century Kaua'i, spread over seven chapters of 40 one-page sections. Merwin's cast includes his native Hawaiian heroes, Ko'olau and his wife (later widow), Pi'ilani; their relatives (a crew that's hard to sort out); the authoritative and admirable Judge Kauai; an iconoclastic cleric, George Rowell; Father Valdemar Knudsen, Ko'olau's employer; and a complement of ill-meaning missionaries and colonialists. The plot, when it gets underway, involves resistance to the cruel government policy of forcibly segregrating Hawaiians diagnosed with leprosy. Stricken with "the separating sickness," Ko'olau, Pi'ilani and their son join an Edenic, illegal settlement of lepers in a remote valley. Into Ko'olau's and Pi'ilani's sad adventures, Merwin splices earlier Hawaiian history and legend, from creation myths to the overthrow of the last native rulers. Readers must acclimate themselves to the fluently ongoing, unpunctuated lines and extended sentences in which Merwin casts all his verse. But after a dozen pages, the six- and seven-beat lines seem surprisingly flexible and appropriate. The fast-moving chapters try hard and well to combine the Homeric grandeur of orally transmitted epics, ecological and historical information ("the landed chiefs' sole remaining wealth was the land/ which no one but they could own") and the simpler pleasures of a suspenseful plot. The rapt attention typical of Merwin's short poems mixes comfortably here with the pathos and characterization of a contemporary realist novel: "she stopped and looked back at the valley she had left/ it looked new and shining in an age that never changed/ and farther away than she had ever seen it."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
A deep sense of place infuses Merwin's sensual poetry, and it, too, is the impetus behind this remarkably dramatic book-length poem. Merwin has rekindled a long-dormant form to present a fictionalized yet fact-based tale of the tragic history of Hawaii, his home, a wondrous scattering of islands calamitously vulnerable to violation. In the opening scenes, Merwin conjures the glistening web of the pristine Hawaiian landscape, naming trees and birds, stones and water, flowers and clouds. His long, lovely lines roll in and out like ocean waves as he slowly adds human beings to the scene and introduces his main characters, Pi'ilani and Ko'olau, who marry and have a son and then witness the diabolical conquest of their beloved island by strange men in huge boats. The men are full of lust and bring iron, cattle, and disease. As Merwin recounts the horrific consequences of their invasion, particularly their treatment of lepers as criminals, his language turns hard, and his lines snap and slash like the lashes of a whip, incising into our collective conscience the painful truth about a place we like to think of as paradise. Donna Seaman

Review
"A major American verse narrative, of which we have too few of this quality. As an achievement it joins the very best of Merwin: The Lice, Travels, and The Vixen." --Harold Bloom

"A masterpiece...His work is like the best gift, unexpected, surprising, and, once considered, profoundly indispensable."--Jane Kramer

"A powerful revisionary telling of a powerful story that makes of a far-flung corner of American geography and history a central event for our national culture."-- John Hollander

"The Folding Cliffs is a masterpiece--a truly original masterpiece, on a very big scale. I could not put it down, and read it with a mixture of amazement and
admiration that went on growing to the last page. Merwin's sinuous, infinitely flexible voice has created a new kind of narrative verse: the tragic history of Hawaii, suffered through one family, told almost as if by a native, with a point-blank simplicity and effortless saga-like realism." --TED HUGHES

"A thrilling historical narrative--taut and skillful and full of lost values. Merwin creates a powerful poetic narrative with great intimacy and humanity." --MICHAEL ONDAATJE

"A bold and stunning chronicle of Hawaii, all the way back to its creation in past ages when volcanoes thrust upward through the blue surface of the Pacific--all beautifully fashioned in a rare epic poetry which is also a kind of transcendent prose. A classic." --PETER MATTHIESSEN

"A masterful narrative. What ensues within the structure of the community
becomes the story of our time. Through the hand of perhaps our most gifted poet, themes of cruelty and compassion, faith and despair, beauty and the loss of the native world around us, become the strands woven around a deeply spiritual story." --TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

"The Folding Cliffs is a vision of love and violence that breathes with the vibrant life and tragic history of the Hawaiian Islands. At one masterstroke, W. S.
Merwin here restores to American poetry the narrative grandeur, mythic resonance, and sweeping moral scrutiny of an earlier age's epics. His book is an
astonishment that will quicken and enlarge the spirit." --J. D. McCLATCHY


From the Hardcover edition.