A new collection by America’s internationalist poet—“a vision both original and universal” (Octavio Paz) Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out at the ethereal blue ice of Antarctica, Nathaniel Tarn writes: “They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the globe: /are you moving toward it?” The various parts of Gondwana cohere into a unified whole that celebrates bird flight, waves, and innervating light while warning against environmental calamity. Some poems celebrate the New Mexican desert as it becomes a place of protest against the invasion of Afghanistan; in another, the rising and falling stairs at Fez in Morocco meld into a meditation on marriage, empire, and the origins of climbing. Elsewhere the heroic fighter pilot Lydia Litvyak is personified as Eurydice speaking to her Captain as Orpheus; and in the final long section, “Exitus Generis Humani,” lines pour over the reader in slow, mournful, yet often humorous, song, revealing “the poets’ hearts are a world’s heart” as the human race ends and whole armies sink into the earth “yearning for mother love.” Celebrated as a poet where “inquiry and ethical action are imperative” (Joseph Donahue, Jacket2), Nathaniel Tarn has lifted up a mind-heart mirror of our contemporary existence in Gondwana and warns us of a definitive ending if we do not demand radical change.
Nathaniel Tarn's newest collection of poems, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, dives deep into the spiritual and physical sufferings of our global age. After a moving overture, the book unfolds in five sections: "Of the Perfected Angels," with its lucid meditation on Issenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald; "Dying Trees," written out of the horrible loss of hundreds of thousands of trees throughout the American West in recent years; "War Stills," an engagement with the ongoing atrocities in Iraq; "Movement / North of the Java Sea," taking flight from Maui to Bali to Papua New Guinea; and the final section "Sarawak," snaking its way through the river and indigenous anguish of Borneo, where Tarn as poet-anthropologist surveyed the loss of forest lands and its effects on tribal peoples.
This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.
Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.
The great German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s spirit infuses this gorgeous cycle of poems that sing of the loves and devastations of our times Each hymn in Nathaniel Tarn’s new collection The Hölderliniae is a love song to the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hölderlin?— the German Romantic poet-philosopher who spent the last thirty-six years of his life sequestered in a carpenter’s tower in the south of Germany. Tarn speaks through Hölderlin and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn in an act of spiritual and lyric possession unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The French Revolution—which Hölderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror—illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall past tragedies. Line after line carries Hölderlin’s hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind’s disciplines and make a universe of its own.
For some forty years, Nathaniel Tarn has been celebrated as an extraordinary figure in American writing. His work in a variety of scholarly and literary genres has ranged from Maya ritual to Jewish mysticism, the monasteries of Burma to the arctic seas of Alaska. One of the founders of ethnopoetics, he has brought to poetry an almost limitless range of interests and a remarkable dexterity in both open and closed forms. As Eliot Weinberger has written, "What holds it together is Tarn's ecstatic vision, his continuing enthusiasm for the stuff of the world.
Nathaniel Tarn's Lyrics for the Bride of God, a book-length poem composed over the course of five years, represents the author's most sustained effort since The Beautiful Contradictions (1969). The Bride, first appearing at the end of that volume, here dominates the entire work in fulfilling her ultimate kabbalistic task: the return of the holy sparks, dispersed among mankind at the creation, to their original Source. In this, the Bride undergoes exile in the guise of a very human woman--constantly changing identity, species, race, color, age, and even sex; ranging through many different mythical and historical settings; raising a host of political issues from ecology to feminism: and creating, against Tarn's anthropological background, an astonishing cosmos propelled by the eternal interaction of male and female. Perhaps the author's most dramatic work, the Lyrics reflect a time of personal tension and loss, a time of exile from Europe transformed into a fervent adoption, on a continental scale, of his new American milieu. Overall, it is Tarn's expansive, energetic woridview that makes the work cohere. At a time when so much poetry lacks either head or heart, Tarn clearly hopes that, in the Lyrics, both have full sway.
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