From Booklist
One of the finest senior U.S. poets stunningly evokes in prose the fabled romance and dark beauty of southwestern France. Seemingly channeling the troubadour spirit of the region, Merwin paints broad, but strikingly detailed, landscapes with his words, using language itself as a main character. He intermingles his personal experiences in the region with the songs of twelfth-century troubadours, illustrating superbly the flexibility of time in the historical cocoon of this ancient and endlessly resurrected locale. Often the prose sounds like poetry, and few other travel writings could aspire to the miraculously transporting quality of these crystalline sentences. The reader feels the restorative effects of this region and its poetry on Merwin, and cannot help but be touched. Like the songs of his troubadours, this little book soothes the soul while keeping the senses wide awake. Will Hickman
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Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2002
Elegaic...Though only fragments remain to...glimpse the troubadours' world, Merwin makes us grateful that we have them.


Book Description

W.S. Merwin, one of the great contemporary English-language poets, turns to prose here in a brilliantly evocative re-creation of a distant past—as well as an exquisite rendering of his own romance with an abandoned farmhouse in the magical countryside of Southwest France. The Mays of Ventadorn: Tales from Southwest France illuminates the origins of the famous 12th-century Provencal troubadours, beginning with the great Bernart de Ventadorn whose work Merwin first encountered as a young translator of the archaic language known as Old Occitan. The timeless beauty of the troubadours’ pastoral songs and narrative poems has enabled them to survive for 900 years, far outlasting the language from which they sprang.

As he reveals the lyrical pleasures in Southwest France’s medieval courts, Merwin also acquaints readers with the ruins of the chateau of Ventadorn, Bernart’s home, as well as the elegantly careworn farmhouse that the poet himself has owned for decades. Merwin brings a sense of historical continuity to his narrative as he writes of how the warm enchantments that distinguish the farmhouse, the local patois, and the area’s rural traditions are in many respects the direct progeny of the troubadours’ storied culture and language of old.

FROM THE PUBLISHER