Synopses & Reviews
In a time when it's all right for poetry to be "spiritual,"and all wrong for any real poem to be "religious,"Mark Jarman's eighth collection, To the Green Man, continues his audacious indifference to this contemporary taboo, leaping into the dangerous currents where poetry and religion meet. The book freshens and enlivens the lexicon of traditional American Christian belief by testing its doctrines and language against contemporary experience, placing Jarman squarely in the line of American poetry stretching from Anne Bradstreet to John Berryman.
Jarman's art is centered in the profundity of religious faith and doubt. But his is not a narrow world, and the range of concern and subject that radiates from his center is wide: the dark side of the American father; the updated takes on primary Western texts (i.e., "Song of Roland,""Over the River and Through the Woods"); the sudden encounters with animals foxes, swifts, coyotes, tanagers; the convincing and charming lyrical speculations on consciousness ("Astragaloi").
A sure practitioner of the hybrid form of lyric-narrative, Jarman can tell a disturbing story with the resonance of a novel, in just two pages of expertly timed tercets ("In the Tube"). The craft, the confidence with language as medium, is such that his touch is always elegant and sure. He writes as beautifully as any living poet.
Synopsis
This collection leaps into the dangerous currents where poetry and reli-gion meet, and enlivens the lexicon of traditional American Christian belief by testing its doctrines and language against contemporary experience.
"Beyond the wonderful music of his lines . . . , what makes To the Green Man such an important and memor-able book is its enactment of a spiritual struggle to be at once at home in the world and astonished by it."—Alan Shapiro
Mark Jarman is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. His book The Black Riviera won the Poets’ Prize, and Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Synopsis
Eighth collection by master of the narrative poem and editor of The Reaper.
About the Author
Jarman is the author of 7 books of poetry: North Sea ('78), The Rote Walker ('81), Far and Away ('85), The Black Riviera ('90), Iris ('92), Questions for Ecclesiastes ('97), and Unholy Sonnets (2000). Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the '97 National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine. During the 1980s he and Robert McDowell published the controversial magazine The Reaper. He is a professor at Vanderbilt U in Nashville.