To the Green Man: Poems - Hardcover

Jarman, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1932511024 ISBN 13: 9781932511024

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2004

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Jarman is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently To the Green Man, published by Sarabande. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets' Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

From The Washington Post:

Lord of the returning leaves, of sleepers
Waking in their tunnels among roots,
Of heart and bush and fire-headed stag,
Of all things branching, stirring the blood like sap,
Pray for us in your small commemorations . . . .
Mark Jarman, "To the Green Man"

Mark Jarman has a religious imagination. He treats poetry as a spiritual quest, and much of his newly published eighth book of poems, To the Green Man, is a serious investigation of faith. He is the son and grandson of preachers and has taken the running quarrel between his father, a rationalist, and his grandfather, a would-be mystic, into the secular realm of his poems, where it becomes a dialogue about reason and the irrational. Poetry may have become his true church, as he seems to suggest in the anecdotal poem "In Church with Hart Crane," but he doesn't escape the hard questions of his upbringing.

Throughout To the Green Man, Jarman ponders the truth of a statement attributed to the Delphic Oracle -- Called or not called, God is present -- and repeatedly turns to the insoluble mystery of God's eternal absence or omnipresence. The poems often read like idiosyncratic prayers. "Let us think of God as a lover/ Who never calls,/ Whose pleasure in us is aroused/ In unrepeatable ways," he writes in the first of "Five Psalms." "God Who Is Absent/ God Who Is Present/ God Who Finds Us/ In Our Hiding Places," he declares in another: "God Whom We Name/ God Whom We Cannot Name/ When We Open Our Mouths/ With the Name God Word God." Here is the fifth psalm:

Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless,
Waves and particle, all and none,
Who lets us measure the wounded atom,
Who lets us doubt all measurement,
When in this world we betray you
Let us be faithful in another.

Jarman's poetry is God-haunted. He writes as an unorthodox but essentially Christian poet who embraces paradox and treats contradiction, to use Simone Weil's phrase, as a lever for transcendence. The sense that faith is a necessary leap, an incredible gamble -- and a gamble on the incredible -- animates his work, which often turns to woods and fields to consider "the nature of the world." Suddenly coming across a fox, he wonders, "What have I done to merit that regard?" When he considers science, as in "Lord Chemistry" ("The kingdom is inside somewhere all right./ It's tucked in by a fold of time and space") or confronts art works -- a 12th-century Byzantine icon, Goya's "Saint Peter Repentant" -- it is usually to consider "the eternal laws/ Of God," which, "like gravity, seem whimsically selective."

The element of chance comes to the fore in his poem "Astragaloi" -- the word for what the Greeks called "knucklebones" and we call dice. Knucklebones came from sheep or goats and were often used as a form of divination.

Astragaloi

We know there must be consciousness in things,
In bits of gravel pecked up by a hen
To grind inside her crop, and spider silk
Just as it hardens stickily in air,
And even those things paralyzed in place,
The wall brick, the hat peg, the steel beam
Inside the skyscraper, and lost, forgotten,
And buried in ancient tombs, the toys and games.
Those starry jacks, those knucklebones of glass
Meant for the dead to play with, toss and catch
Back of the hand and read the patterns of,
Diversions to beguile the endless time,
Never to be picked up again. . . . They're thinking,
Surely, all of them. They are lost in thought.

By Edward Hirsch
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1932511024
• ISBN 13: 9781932511024
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 77