** Limited edition of 70. The cassette comes with a laser printed insert** William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. When he was ten years old, his family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his love of nature and interest in man’s relationship to the environment developed. Environmentalism, Buddhism and a fierce anti-war stance fuelled much of his poetry, which has won him acclaim since the 1950s and 1960s. After having attended Princeton University, Merwin and his then wife moved to Spain in 1952, where he met Robert Graves and became a tutor to Graves’s son. Deeper into the 1950s he befriended Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in London, before moving back to New York City in 1968 and retreating to a rural part of Maui, Hawaii in the 1970s. Merwin is especially known for his anti-Vietnam War poetry and was a respected translator of Spanish, French, Latin and Italian literature. Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice and was bestowed the Tanning Prize among other honours. He died on Hawaii at the age of 91 in 2019.  Ragged Lion Press and Counter Culture Chronicles have jointly released a reading by Merwin at the State University of New York at Buffalo (Sunyab), which was recorded by documentalist and author Allen DeLoach in 1969. The C60 cassette was designed by André Koolmees and comes with a xeroxed biography of the poet. (Ben Schot)