Bold narrative poems that recreate the past. Yet, these are ultimately poems of survival. Jarman explores the redemptive power of the imagination and the ways in which we transform experience into stories we tell about our lives. His characters vividly express the will to cling to existence and understand it as they pursue the meaning of family, home, identity, and love. Invented memories resurrect a forgotten past, opening doors of possibility and adding a strange richness to everyday life. "Flowers of the flesh,/ Hung on the cliffs to watch and be watched./ Don't let me see reproach, don't let me see it,/ In your eyes. Let me be the only one/ Who knows and tells you."

The Black Riviera (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Jarman, Mark

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Bold narrative poems that recreate the past.

I haven't read a new poem for years as extravagantly daring as Mark Jarman's IRIS. This strange and obsessive narrative risks violating almost every preconception we have about how a serious contemporary poem should behave. First, IRIS risks seeming unoriginal. The poem is a passionate homage to Robinson Jeffers, our most neglected modern master. Jarman borrows Jeffers' line, his voice, his landscapes, and his vision. Eventually he even borrows Jeffers himself by making his imagined ghost the tragic chorus of this feverish drama. But the sheer audacity of Jarman's appropriations - like Blake recasting Milton or Pound impersonating Propertius - becomes something more wildly innovative and astonishing than those tame adjustments of theme and style we normally praise as originality. Next, IRIS risks being earnest. In an age when literary criticism celebrates irony, ambivalence, and indeterminacy, Jarman resolutely insists that poetry can truthfully explore matters of mortal consequence. IRIS is the story of a woman who refuses to be crushed by the sordid circumstances of her life - the poverty and drugs, the violence and unredemptive love. In a better world she would have been an artist. But in her desperate corner she struggles simply to understand how freedom or fulfillment is possible. Born to hell, she strains for a glimpse of paradise, even if it can never be her own. Finally, IRIS risks reaching for the sublime. Writing about the landscapes of everyday life, using the language of ordinary people, Jarman pushes his material to its uppermost limit where naturalism merges into myth. IRIS has enhanced the possibilities of our literature by reclaiming a lost tradition of American poetry.

Iris: A book-length poem

Story Line Press

In this book-length narrative poem, Iris, a Kentucky woman in her twenties, escapes an abusive husband and returns home to her mother and drug-running brothers with her young daughter. Having discovered the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, her interest in his work, which she equates with mythical California and a new life, becomes an obsession. Published by Story Line Press, Three Oaks Farm, 27006 Gap Road, Brownsville, OR 97327-9718. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Iris

Story Line Pr

First collection of literary essays by a founder and leading poet-critic of the New Narrative/New Formalist revival. Essays explore the relationship between poetry and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, and poetry by contemporaries such as Donald Justice and Jorie Graham.
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.

The Secret of Poetry

History & Criticism

This first collection of literary essays by a founder and leading poet-critic of the New Narrative/New Formalist revival explores the relationship between poetry and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, and Donald Justice.

United States

“In this wonderful collection of essays, Mark Jarman explores with wit and passion the practice of poetry―of making it, of reading it, of living it. In his vivid analyses of works by Brooks, Boisseau, Donne, Herbert, Rukeyser and Twichell, among others, he explores how the poems and their authors negotiate time and mortality, faith and devotion. He also offers an intimate examination of his own gorgeous work and how it comes onto the page. A delight for readers and writers of poetry.”―Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Mercury The essays in Dailiness are about how a poet makes a poem. For Mark Jarman a poem results from a deliberate and conscious act. He is especially interested in the way human consciousness connects devotional prayer to poetry. In these essays he considers poems written millennia apart―from Gilgamesh to George Herbert’s work, from the poems of Robert Frost to those of Seamus Heaney, to his own recently-written poems and those of his contemporaries. As the poems celebrate the work of daily creation, they possess a religious aspect. In Dailiness Jarman sheds light on how poems accomplish this work.

Dailiness: Essays on Poetry

Essays & Correspondence

Paul Dry Books

"These sensitive and meditative poems offer up new ways to consider the passage of time."--Publishers Weekly "A moving collection that acknowledges the limitations of the human mind, but also the limitless capacity of the human heart."--Chapter 16 The poems in Mark Jarman's new collection, Zeno's Eternity, take their cue from Zeno's paradox, which says that since space is infinitely divisible, an arrow traveling toward a target will never reach its destination. Everything exists in a kind of suspension.&nbsp; From "The Arrow Paradox": Zeno sent his arrow flying endlessly from point to point along its arc to make a point about eternity: getting there is tricky. Though our lives run on, we may feel that certain moments are timeless, and love that moves us toward each other can give us a sense of eternity. Portraying moments from ordinary life and from times long past, moments both pivotal and mundane, Jarman encourages the reader to feel the beat of time and its inexplicable stillness. By making scenes indelible, the poet stops time; and we might ask ourselves, is this not only Zeno's eternity, but ours, too?&nbsp;&nbsp;

Zeno's Eternity

Book by Jarman, Mark, McDowell, Robert

The Reaper Essays

McDowell, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jarman, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jarman, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jarman, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Black Riviera (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Black Riviera (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Iris: A book-length poem

Iris

The Secret of Poetry

The Secret of Poetry

The Secret of Poetry

Dailiness: Essays on Poetry

Zeno's Eternity

The Reaper Essays