Thomas Merton: The Exquisite Risk of Love

Robert Waldron

Thomas Merton, The Exquisite Risk of Love is a commentary on Merton's love poems, Eighteen Poems that also includes cross-referencing to his most intimate journal, Learning to Love, which includes Merton's A Midsummer Journal to M., the latter especially written for the woman he loved, whom he referred to as M. Such an exhaustive and detailed exegesis of Merton's love poetry has never before been done. Robert Waldron, for the first time, tackles the complicated and often heart-rending chronicle of Merton's passionate love for a young nurse he met while being hospitalized in a Louisville hospital for a spinal ailment. To our knowledge, no Merton scholar has offered in one book an exegesis of every poem in Eighteen Poems or correlated each poem with Merton's corresponding journal entries.