Each hymn in Nathaniel Tarn's new collection The Hoelderliniae is a love song to the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hoelderlin?- the German Romantic poet-philosopher who spent the last thirty-six years of his life sequestered in a carpenter's tower in the south of Germany. Tarn speaks through Hoelderlin and Hoelderlin speaks through Tarn in an act of spiritual and lyric possession unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The French Revolution-which Hoelderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror-illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall past tragedies. Line after line carries Hoelderlin's hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind's disciplines and make a universe of its own.

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person." Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

In The Persephones, American poet Nathaniel Tarn (born 1928) and American photographer Joan Myers (born 1941) offer an elegant, collaborative retelling of Persephone's abduction into the underworld. Many of Myers' images were shot at the sites from which the myth originated. Edition of 500 copies.

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the "archaic," studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author's successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person." Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out at the ethereal blue ice of Antarctica, Nathaniel Tarn writes: "They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the globe: /are you moving toward it?" The various parts of Gondwana cohere into a unified whole that celebrates bird flight, waves, and innervating light while warning against environmental calamity. Some poems celebrate the New Mexican desert as it becomes a place of protest against the invasion of Afghanistan; in another, the rising and falling stairs at Fez in Morocco meld into a meditation on marriage, empire, and the origins of climbing. Elsewhere the heroic fighter pilot Lydia Litvyak is personified as Eurydice speaking to her Captain as Orpheus; and in the final long section, "Exitus Generis Humani," lines pour over the reader in slow, mournful, yet often humorous, song, revealing "the poets' hearts are a world's heart" as the human race ends and whole armies sink into the earth "yearning for mother love." Celebrated as a poet where "inquiry and ethical action are imperative" (Joseph Donahue, Jacket2), Nathaniel Tarn has lifted up a mind-heart mirror of our contemporary existence in Gondwana and warns us of a definitive ending if we do not demand radical change.

The perfect gift for Valentine's Day Selected Poems contains Neruda's resonant, exploratory, intensely individualistic verse, rooted in the physical landscape and people of Chile. Here we find sensuous songs of love, tender odes to the sea, melancholy lyrics of heartache, fiery political statements and a frank celebration of sex. This is an enticing, distinctive and celebrated collection of poetry from the greatest twentieth century Latin American poet.

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the "archaic," studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author's successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

Palenque was first published jointly by Shearsman Books and Oasis Books in 1986, and sought to offer British readers an overview of what the poet had been up to since his expatriation to the USA in the early 70s. This book is revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

A Nowhere for Vallejo was first published in New York in 1971, and in London in 1972, with the material collected in it dating back to 1969. A major staging post in the author’s career, it remains one of Nathaniel Tarn’s most significant publications from the 1970s. The dramatic title sequence takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Inca empire, seen through the eyes of the first and last of the Inca emperors and of two great half-Inca writers, both exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and César Vallejo. This sequence and ‘Choices’ were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlán where the author had carried out fieldwork as an anthropologist many years earlier. The book is completed by the ‘October’ sequence, which ends with the moving in memoriam poem ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’.

At the Western Gates was first published by a small press in New Mexico in 1985, and consisted of five powerful long poems that exemplify the best of Nathaniel Tarn's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this new edition, they are joined by another long sequence, `Birdscapes with Seaside', originally a one-off issue of Sparrow magazine in 1976, which fits well with the rest of the contents. This book is revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry

The Desert Mothers was first published by a small press in Mississippi in 1984, and contained several important poems from Nathaniel Tarn's early '80s period. This new edition revives the original chapbook, adding to it three other long sequences from the same period, as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

The House of Leaves was first published by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara in 1976, and was a significant statement of intent by Nathaniel Tarn - alongside his New Directions volume, Lyrics for the Bride of God - which set the tone for what he wanted to achieve now as an American poet after his emigration from England. This new edition repeats the entire original volume and is revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

Alashka is a lost book. It was first published as half of a very large, well-printed volume in 1979, spliced together with Tarn's Selected Poems up until that point. The publisher was a new outfit in Boulder, Colorado, called Brillig Works and born in an eponymous bookstore. Distribution was limited, and fitful, and copies were notoriously hard to come by. This ensured that what was, in effect, Janet Rodney's first collection, vanished from view. Also, although it was a valuable expansion of Tarn's anthro- and eco-poetics, this hardly registered in the wider world, whether in Alaska or in the lower states. The book finally gets its own set of covers here, and a chance to find its own niche, and will soon be joined by some other long-out-of-print Tarn volumes. Although some 40 years old, this book has scarcely aged, and its themes are as apposite today as they were in the 1970s.

Avia is a book-length epic poem that takes for its subject matter the war in the air in World War Two. The verse narratives are stories told by combat pilots from all the major battle theatres, but are related to Charles Lindbergh in a dream as he returns to the United States following his 1927 transatlantic flight. Voices from his future and from our past.

The second set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, which includes Vale Ave by H. D.; Eiko & Koma by Forrest Gander; A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik; The Beautiful Contradictions by Nathaniel Tarn.

For some forty years, Nathaniel Tarn has been celebrated as an extraordinary figure in American writing. His work in a variety of scholarly and literary genres has ranged from Maya ritual to Jewish mysticism, the monasteries of Burma to the arctic seas of Alaska. One of the founders of ethnopoetics, he has brought to poetry an almost limitless range of interests and a remarkable dexterity in both open and closed forms. As Eliot Weinberger has written, "What holds it together is Tarn's ecstatic vision, his continuing enthusiasm for the stuff of the world."

Nathaniel Tarn's Lyrics for the Bride of God, a book-length poem composed over the course of five years, represents the author's most sustained effort since The Beautiful Contradictions (1969). The Bride, first appearing at the end of that volume, here dominates the entire work in fulfilling her ultimate kabbalistic task: the return of the holy sparks, dispersed among mankind at the creation, to their original Source. In this, the Bride undergoes exile in the guise of a very human woman--constantly changing identity, species, race, color, age, and even sex; ranging through many different mythical and historical settings; raising a host of political issues from ecology to feminism: and creating, against Tarn's anthropological background, an astonishing cosmos propelled by the eternal interaction of male and female. Perhaps the author's most dramatic work, the Lyrics reflect a time of personal tension and loss, a time of exile from Europe transformed into a fervent adoption, on a continental scale, of his new American milieu. Overall, it is Tarn's expansive, energetic woridview that makes the work cohere. At a time when so much poetry lacks either head or heart, Tarn clearly hopes that, in the Lyrics, both have full sway.

Nathaniel Tarn's magnificent new collection of poems "Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers" reverberates like a trumpet blast to the present generation. His book opens with a majestic prelude ("as if this moment were ageless and could always return") and is followed by four sections: "Of the Perfected Angels," with its moving meditation on the Issenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald; "Dying Trees," written out of the loss of thousands and thousands of trees throughout the American West in recent years; "War Stills," an engagement with the ongoing atrocities in Iraq; and the final section, "Movement/The North of The Java Sea," that snakes its way through the rivers and the indigenous anguish of Borneo, where Tarn as poet-anthropologist surveyed the loss of forest lands and its effects on tribal peoples. Reflective, conversational, at times humorous, and always profound, "Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers" is Tarn's most compelling collection to date.