You know you live in a wonderful part of the world when you can drop by the local cemetery and leave some spring flowers on the grave of one of America's great poets.

I enjoyed that errand this week, inspired while reading the extraordinary new biography of Stonington poet James Merrill by Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University.

Hammer's enormous book "James Merrill: Life and Art" has been hailed by critics this month, including Dwight Garner in the New York Times, who called it "nearly flawless literary biography" and "something close to brilliant," as well as Dan Chiasson, writing in The New Yorker, who called it "as vivid and artful an account of an author's life and work as we are likely to encounter."

The book does justice to the remarkable life and work of someone who, born to great wealth — James Merrill was the son of Charles Merrill, co-founder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch — nevertheless worked tirelessly at his art, winning every major American literary award, including two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize.

Hammer is due here for a talk about his book May 9 at the La Grua Center in Stonington.

I have been especially drawn to parts of the book that describe Merrill's life in Stonington, where he spent part of every year with his partner of four decades, David Jackson. They also spent time in Greece and Key West, Fla., and had apartments in New York City.

Merrill and Jackson first arrived in Stonington in 1954, visiting a friend. They almost immediately found an apartment on Water Street that eventually became home.

Hammer writes how the village especially appealed to Merrill, allowing him to escape a busy social life in New York and devote more time to his work. He loved the light here and the way it reflected on the water.

He also loved the tight scale of architecture, which Hammer said reminded him of Manhattan.

"From their new address at 107 Water Street, in the center of town, Jimmy and David had the necessaries close at hand: a post office, a used bookstore, a liquor store, a drugstore ... There were interesting characters to meet, mainly 'summer people' or retirees who had led mildly glamorous lives elsewhere," Hammer writes.

Merrill wrote in his poem "The Summer People" about the character of the village.

"On Main the summer people/Took deep–rooted ease — /A leaf turned red, to town they'd head. On Gold lived the Portuguese/Whose forebears had manned whalers."

Hammer writes a bit of everyday routines in the village for Jackson and Merrill, who wrote most mornings and enjoyed long walks. The two sometimes rowed out to Sandy Point, walked the sandy shoreline and swam naked. They bought lobsters at the town wharf and ate them on their deck, several floors above Water Street.

During Hurricane Carol in 1954 they sought shelter with a neighbor, famed pianist George Copeland, who played Debussy while roaring winds pounded the village.

Merrill's glamorous connections sometimes intruded, including a visit to Stonington by Truman Capote, who Hammer relates was bitten by a small dog, on his writing hand, in front of Merrill's home on Water Street.

Capote, according to Hammer, dubbed Stonington "Creepyville," a moniker Jackson and Merrill later playfully recalled among themselves.

Merrill had a difficult time squaring his homosexuality with his family, a conflict he explored at great length in the context of his fiction.

He eventually observed that he had the good fortune to stay in place "while the closet eventually disintegrated."

Still, for much of their time in Stonington, at least the early years, Jackson and Merrill did not disclose the nature of their relationship. Both had other lovers. Jackson was married before he met Merrill and still wore a wedding ring.

Merrill was sometimes said to have a mistress in Mystic, Hammer wrote, meant as a deception, a suggestion of heterosexuality.

Merrill died of a heart attack while on vacation in Arizona in 1995. None of the obituaries at the time reported then that he had AIDS. Indeed, none of the many yellowed clips on Merrill in The Day's archives mention AIDS.

Merrill, despite his fame, kept a low profile in Stonington. He was named Connecticut's poet laureate in the mid-1980s but never performed an official duty. Gov. John Rowland once asked Merrill to compose something for his inauguration and Merrill declined.

Merrill did drive around town in a small little Ford with a license plate that said "Poet."

He left his building on Water Street to the Stonington Village Improvement Association, which to this day makes Merrill's top-floor apartment available as a work/living space for visiting writers.

Merrill's apartment remains largely the same as when he and Jackson lived there, often communicating with the spirit world on a Ouija Board, sessions that became an integral part of much of the great poet's work.

The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places and occasionally open to the public for tours.

At the Stonington Cemetery this week, it was reassuring to see Merrill and Jackson buried alongside one another, with some of their Stonington friends nearby.

I suppose if they lived in Stonington today, they might be married. It seems they are forever together here. Maybe someone with a Ouija Board will learn more.

I also remembered at the graves a line about Stonington borough from "The Summer People": "Trains passed but did not stop."

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct