“…and he told me the names of the stars and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling around them; and when I came home he shewed me how they rolled round… for from my early readings of fairy tales and genii, etc. etc. -my mind had been habituated to the vast.”

From a letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

”When in mid-May the sickening east wind

Shifts sudden to the south, the small warm rain

Melts out the frozen incense from all flowers,

And fills the air with so much pleasant health

That even the dying man forgets his shroud.”

To J Reynolds, 1818, from the letters of John Keats (1795-1821)

“I do not write for the public. You are my public.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

This website serves as a digital archive for the poetry, stories, essays, artworks, and photographs of Jack Merlin Booth.

Jack Merlin Booth is an Irish-Australian writer, artist, and musician based in the forests of Western Massachusetts, USA.

Raised in Perth, Western Australia, Booth studied Philosophy and German before completing a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Liverpool, focusing on Nietzsche and Paul Klee. He later undertook doctoral research in Art History at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. After living in Berlin from 2017 to 2024, he relocated to New England to devote himself more fully to family life, contemplation, and artistic practice.

Previously active as a songwriter in a musical collaboration with Eleni Poulou and as a viola player in The Midnight Audience, Booth draws on German Romanticism, folk culture, monastic and contemplative traditions, and the philosophies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, and René Guénon.

Musically, his work engages with Irish and British folk music and has been shaped by figures such as Béla Bartók, Robbie Basho, John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Anne Briggs, and Jon Hassell. He plays fingerstyle 12-string guitar, viola, and trumpet.