The Tree of the Doves

Using several ageless questions—“Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do?”—as his point of departure, award-winning poet Christopher Merrill explores the related issues of terror, modernity, tradition, and epochal transformation. In three extended essays, Merrill observes the performance of a banned ritual in the Malaysian province of Kelatan; traces Saint-John Perse's epic voyage from Beijing to Ulan Bator in 1921, and relates it to the China of today; and embarks on a trip across the Levant in 2007 in the wake of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Merrill asserts that it is in this trinity of human actions—ceremony, expedition, war: all devised to keep terror at bay—that history is formed, and that the technological, political, environmental, and social changes we are witnessing now presage the end of one order and the creation of another.