Author relishes chance to introduce 'new' poetry by Merton

Published: 2005-10-18

HONOLULU (CNS) -- It isn't often that the opportunity comes along to introduce a new selection of poems by Thomas Merton. For Kathleen Norris, a well-known poet and spirituality author herself, the once-in-a-lifetime chance was one she couldn't refuse. The selection is a just-released 235-page softcover book that compiles the famous Trappist monk's poetry from the mid-1940s to his death. Titled "In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton," it is published by New Directions and edited by Lynn R. Szabo. In the book's five-and-a-half-page introduction, "I said that, like Walt Whitman, he (Merton) contained multitudes," Norris said. "Here is a guy who spent a good part of his life in a monastery, but his experience of human life is so broad and vast that he writes about many different things in many different voices." Merton, born in 1915, became a Trappist monk in 1941 and died in 1968 of electrocution in Thailand. A well-known author and poet, his most famous work is his autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain."

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