Nathaniel Tarn
Selected Poems: 1950-2000
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2002
Nathaniel Tarn’s Selected Poems collects a half century’s
work from a life lived between disciplines and continents. An anthropologist
turned poet, Tarn moves across an impressive range of myths and geographies
in search of a poetry that can speak to the widest range of human concerns,
engaging "the heart of mankind beating from one end of a/great city
to another which is the whole earth now."
Tarn is probably best known for his translations of Neruda, and his own
work follows Neruda’s in its commitment to the traditional resources
of the lyric, its outrage at the New World’s ruined promise and its
faith in the poet’s continuing ability to speak out "with the
voice that does not lie/at the depth where it becomes the voice of any
man." From the earliest poems in 1964’s Old Savage/Young
City, Tarn sets out to restore a mythic consciousness to the thick
particulars of everyday experience. His work is in the tradition of Olson
and Pound and, behind them, Frazer’s The Golden Bough in its
effort to bring pre-modern modes of understanding to the ruptured ecology
of an increasingly Westernized world. One of the most appealing features
of Tarn’s poetry is the way it tweaks the borders between myth and
experience, as sharply-observed details from the poet’s travels and
personal history join larger narrative structures drawn from sources as
varied as the Kabbalah, Classical mythology and Tarn’s fieldwork
among the peoples of Alaska, Guatemala and East Asia. The Persephone myth
in particular recurs in various cultural guises, her cyclical return from
the dead mirroring Tarn’s own hope that a renewed respect for the
feminine can balance modernity’s excess. "We have no alternative,"
he writes in The Beautiful Contradictions, "to taking the
whole world as our mother."
The collection begins and ends with meditations on the city, an emblem
of civilization’s destructiveness ("Cities devour her face")
but also the possibility of a redeemed social space — "all reassembled,
all transfigured,/a human reign." Mediating between despair and redemption
is the poet’s cosmic sense of the present, alive to a world where
lovers blur into goddesses, the lyric ‘I’ meshes with nature’s
cycles and the instant pulls constantly towards eternity, circling "down
through forgetfulness/to some new, unified beginning." Some readers
will welcome Tarn’s "habit of looking for the eternal side of
things" along with his willingness to claim for poetry something
like a global function. Others may find the poems pushing too insistently
towards rapture, and wish for more of the trickster’s humor to go
with the shaman’s vision. Tarn is an expansive poet, and some of
the best poems in the collection — from The Beautiful Contradictions,
Lyrics for the Bride of God and the outstanding Architextures
— are detached from the longer serial arcs that give them resonance.
But despite its limitations, Selected Poems is a powerful record of a
poet richly devoted to "Our moods of love/as they will seize and
shake us all our lives."
-- Rodney Koeneke
