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In his amazing new book, Epistles, Mark Jarman writes passionately of doubt and belief, making of the two poles one desire to know all he can in a world without certainty. He considers contemporary life—the growing beauty of children, the fascination of DNA, the horror of the Ganges rising in Bangladesh—with the same urgency as when he asks about God. Contemplating things unseen, he uses metaphors of scientific exactness reminiscent of Donne's explorations of the physical universe. To read this book is to be reminded of how many major poems have their roots in prayer. A poem like “Despite the ash in the air” may well cause you to exclaim, whether a believer or an unbeliever: By God, this is true. —Grace Schulman
In these challenging and marvelously rewarding “epistles,” Jarman never flinches from the realities of our human predicament. Out of these conflicts he cultivates astonishing gardens of thought. This is simply a book that explores with intelligence and honesty the hopes and despairs of the human spirit.What emerges from these investigations, these meditations, is not always consoling, but it never fails to be real, wise, and enormously beautiful. —David Bottoms
Physicists sometimes say they are looking for “God's Equation.” In Epistles, Mark Jarman makes of language a powerful spiritual calculus, writing profoundly inventive proofs for the central mysteries of our existence. The tone is by turns dry, witty, passionate, somber, whimsical, and more—permeated always by a lucid intelligence. Intimate addresses to the reader, the poems issue from a speaker who at times resembles your next-door neighbor, at others an angel or prophet; sometimes all three. Whatever the guise, we seem in the presence of one of God's messengers, speaking in a familiar idiom. And though he will not lie to make us feel better, he has our best interests at heart—he brings good news. “God,” Jarman says, “has committed you to memory.”
Mark Jarman was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, and grew up in California and Scotland. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of eight additional books of poetry: North Sea (1978), The Rote Walker (1981), Far and Away (1985), The Black Riviera (1990), Iris (1992), Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997), Unholy Sonnets (2000), and To the Green Man (2004). Jarman’s awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award for his poetry in 1974, three NEA grants in poetry in 1977, 1983, and 1992, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 1991-1992. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets’ Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.
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