"The thirty prose poems that make up Epistles are as compellingly modern in their form as they are timeless in their quest for spiritual truths amid radical doubts."-David Lehman
These are compellingly modern prose poems in the style of Paul's Letters to the Corinthians.
Mark Jarman's book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets' Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award. Jarman is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
]]>She has no reason to remember thisThis poem showcases the pleasures of Mark Jarman's clear lines and metaphors, his workmanlike meter, his calm reasonings, the slow unfolding of a longish poem. These are old-fashioned pleasures; he is not an old-fashioned poet, but one who has considered at length Ecclesiastes's saw about there being nothing new under the sun. The title poem tells the story, in questions, of the narrator's minister father visiting a teenage suicide's family. The questioning acts like a centrifuge that spins a disturbing gravity around the central story, building to one paraphrase of the book's central query: "And what if one with only a casual connection to the tragedy remembers a man, younger than I am today, going out after dinner and returning, then sitting in the living room, drinking a cup of tea, slowly finding the strength to say he had visited these grieving strangers and spent some time with them?" Poetry is, for Jarman, more an act of questioning than an act of answering, though there is room for a few speculative answers. In the parable of "Unholy Sonnet 12," a farmer more pious than Job cries, "Why?" to God when a flood sweeps his farm away: "And God grumped from his rain cloud, 'I can't say. / Just something about you pisses me off.'" With Questions for Ecclesiastes, Jarman joins the small congregation of poets, with George Herbert at the pulpit, who perceive a relationship between poetic form and the spiritual form of being. --Edward Skoog]]>
Declining beachtown where she was not young
With any sort of love or happiness
Or now, to see it renovated, sprung
To a new level of well-being, grow
Nostalgic as her son does. Home
Is nothing to be sick for, when you know
It is an idea sculpted out of foam.
"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.
]]>Mark Jarman's honors for poetry include the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poets' Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and three NEA fellowships. Co-author of The Reaper Essays and co-editor of Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Jarman lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University.
]]>Characterized by an observant tone—clear-eyed, pragmatic—the poems here are informed by the scene and excitement generated by Levine, his colleagues and visiting poets, and the fields and orchards surrounding Fresno. _How Much Earth_ is a crucial record of this major American literary movement.
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