Divine Comedies is the watershed book of James Merrill's life as a poet. Characterized by resolution and reconciliation and by Proustian recall, it is his most important book. It displays Merrill at the peak of his lyrical and narrative powers; but it's a dense, strenuous book…. At the same time it is innocent of the charge of hermeticism, as his last two volumes were not. Difficult of access as these poems are, only a page or so is downright impossible; and for the first time Merrill has made available to readers, on the copyright page, sources of information outside his text…. Inevitably The Book of Ephraim overshadows [the] lesser Divine Comedies; but each of the long poems in Part I (and at least one of the three single-pagers that bracket and bisect them, a sweet-natured character sketch called Manos Karastefanís) is wonderful in its own way. All...