Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

American Poet, v. 34

PN Review

Image: Art, Faith, Mystery

Harvard Review

– , in Publishers Weekly, 2007/08/01

Known in the 1980s as a New Formalist-a crusader for traditional rhymes and meters-the prolific and thoughtful Jarman now attracts more attention as a poet of Christian belief. That belief, its relevance to everyday life, and its implications for a literary style, become the constant topic for this set of thirty gentle prose poems, their interests and occasionally their phrasings taken from the Epistles of St. Paul. Jarman searches for connections between the next world and the one all around us, between the ideas he pursues and the life he sees: "There is no formula for bliss," he says early on, "yet why not pretend there is?" Welcoming paragraphs and insistent sentences all but invite readers to pray along with Jarman, or at least make clear what he derives from prayer: "at the meeting, the assembly of the lost where we are heading, our heaven will be desert distance, dunes of self-denial." Anxious (and well-informed) about modern science, always personal if rarely autobiographical, Jarman may imagine this volume not only as a book of prose poetry, but as a meditative religious aid; "the objects of God's love," he concludes, "are more numerous than we can ever hope to accept." Whatever its fate as contemporary poetry, this heartfelt volume could find a substantial following among readers who seek intelligent short essays about their faith.

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– Karla Huston, in Library Journal, 2007/09/01

"Let this be like the prayer that God will always answer. The one
that/ gives thanks for everything and asks for nothing." In his
ninth book of poems (after To the Green Man), Jarman uses the
expansiveness of prose to create a series of epistles in which he
speaks to the reader and, in Whitmanesque manner, perhaps to the
world. Many poems adhere to St. Paul's biblical writings, which are
often instructive, suggesting that readers, "Do the impossible.
Restore life to those you have killed, wholeness to/ those you have
maimed." Many poems consider subjects taken from the headlines,
while others reflect complicated abstractions like bliss,
attachment, death, and paradoxes of being and not--questions asked
and sometimes answered. In juxtaposition to religious spirituality,
Jarman uses mathematics and science to create metaphors about
belief. "We live in the hollow of immense desire./ Life ends with a
bonus, the means to our death. We are added to zero,/ then
multiplied by it." While most of the poems explore faith in its
many manifestations, there is something here transcendent that
speaks to everyone. Highly recommended.

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– Billy Merrell, in American Poet, v. 34, 2008/04/01

Books Noted
Mark Jarman, Epistles


Connected strongly with the new formalist movement and its dedication to formal verse structures, Mark Jarman's latest collection Epistles (Sarabande's choice for its 100th title) offers a departure in the form of thirty poignant prose poem addresses. Each piece testifies to the value of spiritual transcendence -- if not the existence of greater, inaccessible forces -- through devotional modes and didactic reasoning. Written since 1994, these poems are exploratory proofs against vacant materialism and unquestioned agnosticism. Their engagement with elements of humor and specific contemporary imagery, and the documentation of a revelatory, yet self-questioning mind comprise a poetry of refreshing earnestness and insightful investigation of humanity.

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– David C. Ward, in PN Review, 2008/07/18

EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

MARK JARMAN, Epistles (Sarabande Books) $13.95



It's audacious, possibly even sacrilegious, for Mark Jarman to write a series of prose poems called Epistles as 'If I Were Paul', as the first epistle is titled. (That there are fourteen epistles from Paul the Apostle, while Jarman dares to write thirty, might raise an eyebrow in the Curia.) Yet Jarman brings this literary and spiritual project off to such a movingly artistic effect that any thought of an ex cathedra dismissal of his literary search is washed away by the scope and achievement of Epistles. Jarman's investment in his writing is such that in Epistles he abandons his long and dedicated adherence to formal verse and adopts the prose poem as the vessel with which to express his spiritual discontent.


Jarman's decision to skip over free verse for the prose poem may he the result of a small crisis of conscience, one that reveals his recognition of the difference between Paul's task and his own. Paul was laying down the law and creating the new church. He wrote as a formalist, in other words. Jarman, writing in a society in which the varieties of religious experience are immense, faces the opposite problem: for good or for ill, there are too many churches. Jarman isn't interested in building a new church, but rather in sweeping away the clutter to engage God's mystery. With this intent, it would be presumptuous for him to be a formalist—that would make him Luther, not Paul—so he uses the more expansive form of the prose poem, thereby adhering to his deeply held opinion that free verse is ill-disciplined narcissism.


One of the nice things about Jarman's prose poems is that they freshen up and invigorate a genre of writing that has become formulaic and clichéd. Descended from Baudelaire and Poe, it seems to me that the prose poem has become routinised into a hardened block of prose in which the writer makes an observation, writes about her reaction to the observation, and then veers off into a moment of surrealism in order to end the piece with at least the appearance of a reconciliation between perception and consciousness. The prose poem suffers from over-subjectivity—with the exceptions of a few masters’ work, they always seem sophomoric hot-house exercises. Jarman loosens up this form because his spiritual crisis makes it open-ended: he doesn't know. He is trying to clear himself out of the way so the long lines in his epistles take on an incantatory lightness; in a comparison he might not like in his previous role as a poetic lawgiver, his lines show a great deal of debt to . . . Walt Whitman. And his subject, just as it was for the pioneer of free verse, is the great American theme of transcendence. Yet Jarman won't take the option of leaving the congregation or the church as Emerson literally did or as Thoreau and Whitman did in practice. Jarman won't take the easy way out by breaking with history, his own (I presume) or western religion, and adopting some form of new consciousness that unites an immanent God with man, calling it zen or 'eastern' or what you will. For Jarman, form—poetic and spiritual—is necessary for man's salvation.


Above all, discipline is necessary if man is to return to a true understanding of his humanity through his struggles to understand God's plan. The first epistle, 'If I Were Paul', asks for Pauline reform by returning to first principles; the first line is 'Consider how you were made' and after a three-line break it goes on:



Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull's cup.



You can't help seeing Leonardo's 'Vetruvian Man' here as Jarman counterpoises faith and rationality. 'Passionate symmetry' has a nicely judged double meaning playing off Blake's 'fearful symmetry' and the wildness of nature with the gift of the Passion (represented also in the skull of Golgotha and then symbolically alluded to in the cup of the Eucharist) to give life a meaning beyond the self. Jarman recalls us to our original creation in order to urge us to reform the body of the world: 'Do the impossible. Restore life to those you have killed, wholeness to those you have maimed. . . . Bless each other with the heart and soul, the hand and eye. . . .'


In subsequent epistles, Jarman takes on the great subjects of worldly and spiritual torment, roughly mirroring Paul's preachings and writings, his travel and exile, although not the martyrdom except in the most subtle evocations of the self dissolving. Not unlike Christopher Logue's 'modernisation' of the Iliad, Jarman is a supple writer, crossing time to bring back the contemporary. The wittily desperate 'My Travels in Abyssinia' catches the missionary at wits' end:



My travels in Abyssinia are at an end. I hear three kinds of singing around me at this instant. Each voice (it is night) is pleading. I need a Dictionary of Commerce and Navigation. I need silk stocking woven with elastic threads. I need cartridges, fruit pastilles. I need your word. Your solemn touch. A simple answer.



A simple answer found only in humility: 'You know how it is to set out, laden with all you will leave enroute. / To look back and see the years, like chairs and tables, abandoned / in the desert. . . . You now how it is to take stock by repeating at least, at least, until all you have is your life.' Jarman's insistence on the moment of recognition, the stripping away of vanities (he writes a poem telling the thief what to steal!), and the necessity of struggle recalls St Augustine's call to the would-be-faithful: 'Now that life has descended down to you / Will you not ascend up to it—and live.'


Epistles is in six sections. Section five ends with the crucifixion and Christ's transformation of the 'dogwood where he was nailed, "I know you pity me. Never again will you grow like the oak and provide lumber for crucifixions. You will be slender. . . . In this transformation, remembering me, you will be forgiven."' And Jarman concludes by showing the transubstantiation of the body into clouds, trees and finally waves that bring Jarman to a kind of pantheism created by the crest and fall of surf: 'I want / you to think of yourself like that, of your body and soul like that, one / flesh traveling to shore, to collapse, all that way to end by darkening / the sand and evaporating. Where do you go? You repeat in other waves. . . .' Jarman maintains his discipline to the end, balancing between staying and going through the instrument of his incantatory voice. But can he bend without breaking? In America there have always been two solutions to spiritual doubt (well, three if you count apathy): a return from antinomianism to the structure of a church (usually Catholic) or a wholesale embrace of apostasy. In fighting off both temptations, Jarman has given us a religious verse of genuine spiritual depth and poetic power, qualities due to Jarman's un-American acceptance of the likelihood of tragedy. His moral seriousness is a relief.


But just to end on a devilish note, one of the many intriguing things about Jarman's prose poem epistles is that if you reorder his lines, you end up with quite wonderful free verse. To take one example at random, here is the opening to Jarman's epistle, number 16 'All my concern': 'All my concern is for what you will not give away, what you keep to / yourself, withheld in your soul's shut and crowded closet. You have / something in there, don't you?' Now in free verse:



All my concern

Is for what you will not give away

What you keep to yourself

Withheld in your soul's shut

And crowded closet.

You have something in there,

Don't you?




The poems would be very long but too many poems these days are too short, and the care with which Jarman has crafted his long lines never evidences any flabbiness or laziness. But if I can be forgiven this appropriation, lining out Jarman's prose 'sentences' and sounding them in this way reveals that they are not really epistles at all. They are Psalms—and even prayers. Jarman's agon is that unlike Paul he is not sure that he has an audience. In the desolation of this isolation, it is all the more necessary to keep discipline, not to unbound his lines and admit that there may be no one to hear his passionate call.



DAVID C. WARD


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– Hannah Faith Notess, in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, 2008/07/18

Image, Summer 2008, No. 58


Doxologies and Admonitions




The thirty prose poems that comprise Mark Jarman's Epistles exhort, console, command, question, and answer the reader—sometimes all in the same poem. "If I were Paul..." the opening poem begins, and so we know we are meant to think about the Pauline epistles. Yet Jarman's poems range far from Paul in their subject matter, bringing in radio talk shows and sweaty joggers right along with the parts of a plant and the mysteries of DNA. Although science and scientific language appear frequently, science is not really the subject. Instead, Jarman makes scientific knowledge serve as a metaphor for all human understanding and for its limits. Jarman is concerned with the limits of knowledge, and he wants to use the poem as a vehicle to discover them:



I have lost my explanation for the

divine plan.


The vehicle for my metaphor was either

the depths of pi or it was the trajectory

of DNA. I think something about the

existence of numbers going on infinitely

backwards reassured me. But how from

that do I extrapolate love?



Mathematics calls across distances. The

angels are sines and cosines. And so

on. But can heaven choose between

one and many? There is no warmth

in knowing God's guts are a string of

irrational numbers.



This is heady stuff. Yet these poems remain grounded in human life, and Jarman is keenly aware that grand, philosophical abstractions exist right alongside ordinary people. This blend of abstract and ordinary recalls Paul's letters, which swerve between richly poetic doxologies and admonitions against squabbling in church. And this blend recalls one of the central questions that contemporary interpreters of Paul's letters face: Which parts of them are personal, bound by the time and place of the writer, and which are universal? Insofar as they are interpretations of Paul, Jarman's poems seem to give a both/and reply. Their tone is both intimate and formal. "Do the impossible," the opening poem commands: "Restore to life those you have killed, wholeness to those you have maimed, goodness to what you have poisoned, trust to those you have betrayed." This command sounds like an addition to the Sermon on the Mount, while the next poem commands: "Sit at your kitchen table with the phone in your hand, the radio on," evoking an intimate setting where moral absolutes are difficult to perceive.


The poems reflect a tension between doubt and faith that is present in Jarman's earlier work, particularly his Unholy Sonnets. It might seem strange that a poet who's known for his sonnets and who has edited a collection of "New Formalist" poetry would write a book of prose poems. But in Jarman's hands, the verse paragraphs have the compact energy of sonnets. The fluidity of the form allows him to achieve the illusion of ease in his style, a freewheeling conversancy with divine mystery and ordinary life, so that each poem is, in the words of holy sonneteer John Donne, "a little world made cunningly."


Jarman also draws on the tradition of prose-poem writers like James Tate, embracing the surreal and the humorously bizarre. "Recently I learned that God no longer delighted in my existence," one poem's narrator tells us. "He had grown homesick for the child I was, and regarded the balding, graying, overweight, five-nine middle-aged man with some disenchantment." His willingness to play with the trope of a "personal relationship with God" serves Jarman well. But he always knows when to leave abstraction and rhetoric behind and enter the world of image:



Someone else could embody all I

am saying in a horse. He would see

it through the animal's coffee clear

eye, as it stood between traces on

cobblestones, pained by a growth above

its right fetlock—a soft, gray, carrotlike

protrusion.



Just when the poem is in danger of slipping into the realm of pure abstraction, it grounds the reader in a meticulously observed image. These moments are breathtaking, and Jarman produces them with regularity and impeccable timing. Certainly Epistles is a book that bears rereading.


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– Joyce Wilson, in Harvard Review, 2008/07/18

Harvard Review


Epistles by Mark Jarman, Sarabande Books, 2007, $13.95 paper, ISBN 9781932511536.




Many poets borrow from, allude to, and imitate portions of the Bible. In his ninth collection of poems, Epistles, Mark Jarman imagines what he would write if he were the apostle Paul today. With this task come expectations of Paul's example: letters to unify specific audiences under the new church and to instruct them how to live a moral Christian life. Reading Jarman's Epistles prompts one to ask, who are his audiences today? How are they being won over? How does the speaker exercise his position of leadership?


The speaker is self-effacing, admitting in the first poem that he is not sure whether those addressed will read or understand his letters, even if they do receive them. The most substantial portrait occurs shortly after this where he describes himself as a salesman of church accessories dealing with pastors who are barely paying attention, or who seem not to take him seriously enough to give him more than ten minutes of their time. As we continue, we see that the speaker is well-educated in the arts and sciences, has traveled widely, and is obsessed with current events. He is experienced in the ways of the world, at ease in the home as well as the marketplace. His examples and language appeal to the ways in which a contemporary educated audience sees itself. Then, like Paul, he asks that we change our ways of seeing.


Jarman addresses those who listen to talk shows, who visit community centers, who are hospitalized for operations, who have drug habits, who care for elderly parents, who steal. But many in his audience are unlike the hard-hearted, stiff-necked Jews and Gentiles Paul was intent on winning over. Jarman's targets seem soft in the middle, wanting to be entertained, to have everything explained to them, to be transported by lovely prose and exquisite metaphor. To these, Jarman presents the following description of man's creation:



Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull's cap.



He shows his command of writing here, uniting ornate adjectives with images from the natural world that would appeal to someone wanting to be transfigured through the experience of reading poetry. And one wonders how much more of the book will be lulling and consoling like this beautiful and romantic passage.


Soon it becomes evident that Jarman’s speaker is aware of the manipulative capacity of such writing. He warns, “Keep thinking this way and you may console yourself endlessly.” He then proceeds, using irony and paradox to challenge and persuade. Although we usually talk of life as concrete and death as abstract, perhaps we should reverse the attributes, viewing death as the concrete reality, “accepting its final illness, the vanishing point like a mustard seed sprouting the multiple and enormous branches of pollen-gold, flowering oblivion.” Or, rather than focus on the transgressions of the thief, why not consider the situation from the point of view of the things being stolen, how they wait to be taken “with a saintly indifference.” The thief has given the possessions a new life in the pawn shop or with someone else. Now we see the folly of our role. “We attached ourselves to things, and now we feel like amputees. The wrist of the watch, severed. The fingers snapped from the neck of the violin. The eye of the camcorder plucked out. Where the laptop sat, a lapse.” In shifting the focus from the act of the thief to the role of the object, the speaker suggests that the pain of our release from the union with earthly matter can be reversed with a change in viewpoint, an act of faith, a modicum of humor.


We know that Jarman's father was a preacher, a fact that explains his ambition to write a book that imitates the epistles of St. Paul. If Paul's letters prescribe the way to live the moral life and die gracefully, Jarman's poetry shows how these processes will feel.



—Joyce Wilson


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