The Geography of Lograire

Merton's final and most ambitious long poem, completed in the summer of 1968, a few months before his journey to Asia, and published by New Directions in 1969 (153 pages, with notes on sources). The text was printed as he left it, without the final proof revision he would have made. Lograire is both a country of the imagination and Merton himself: sections of personal experience are set against passages reworked from anthropological and historical texts, including African legends, Mayan religious customs, the seventeenth-century English Ranters, an Arctic expedition, the travels of Ibn Battuta, the Cargo Cults of Melanesia and the Ghost Dances of the American Indians. New Directions compares it to William Carlos Williams's Paterson.