Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers
BY Nathaniel Tarn
(New Directions Publishing, 2008)

Nathaniel Tarn is not afraid to take on the big questions. Fueled by a lifetime of study in the fields, literally and figuratively, of anthropology and poetry, he emerges once again in this new volume of poetry, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, as a supple and highly intelligent voice. Embracing with gusto the perennial questions of humankind, he is forthcoming, and aware, of his own starting points and burning issues.

In the first poem, “Pursuit of the Whole and Parts,” he establishes as agenda:

And declares:

He insists on the “stubbornness, the innate cussedness [and stubbornness] of the part / any part” which “links you to the moment, / to the circumstantial existence of yourself in time” (p. 1). There follows a profusion of the particular swept up in compelling language, a never-ending search for significance and wholeness, from Tarn’s home in New Mexico to distant places, via meditative states to veritable rants, with razor-sharp mind, clarity of vision, and passionate heart.

The book is divided into five sections, including many long poems, giving the poet time and space to gather disparate material to good effect. Many of the individual poems use a fairly regular long line. One notable exception, “Mathis at Issenheim” (pp. 22-29), uses varying line lengths and a sometimes shorter line. This poem occurs in the first section, “Of the Perfected Angels,” a series of elegiac meditations about, put broadly — the art of living.

The second section, “Dying Trees (Andante Maestoso)” is a tour de force of disjunction and fusion, so to speak — the parts providing a peek into wholeness, or the lack thereof. Comprised of nine poems, it speaks of a tree-destroying drought, cancer diagnoses and our ongoing wars with no real breaks, a deadly progression. In the poet’s hands, the heartbreak of these particular dying trees seems even more unbearable than mass destruction:

The third section, “War Stills,” contains poems as dense and as powerful as any in the collection. Tarn pulls no punches. In the poem, “Asphyxiation,” the poet ferociously demands that we, in whose name atrocities are committed, realize our silent complicity and the price we are paying as human beings:

concluding

The fourth section, “Movement/North of the Java Sea,” contains similarly vatic poems, set in the narrative framework of a Pacific journey. In the first poem, “Ascending Flight, Los Angeles,” the previous section’s darkness lifts a bit:

This becomes personal in “Self and Other” where

The last section, “Sarawak” contains only the title poem, “Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers,” written, according to the poet’s note, during a two month trip in the wild regions of Sarawak, Borneo, East Malaysia, in 2005. Twelve pages long, this complex and muscular poem contains many elements of previous poems, but is an utterly new creation. Resuming the bird imagery, the poet says:

These are erudite poems, in some ways difficult to enter, but once entered, riveting. In an interview “On Anthropology and Poetry,” that appeared in his book of essays and critical writings The Embattled Lyric (2007), Tarn complains that he can’t get anyone to truly engage with some material he has written: “I don’t think anybody who’s talked to me has looked at this thing and said, ‘Hey, this is interesting because…’”

Lest I err similarly by summarizing the book (not that I could do so easily), or by over-quoting (how can I not, when the poetry is so good?) or by merely adding more words of praise to the accolades he has received in the past forty-five years as a poet, I will say that I found the seven page ekphrastic poem, “Mathis at Issenheim,” mentioned above “interesting” because… it draws from the most compelling and influential notions of individual identity in our culture not as a way to rehash this material, or to take a position on centuries of cultural baggage, but to ask the question afresh within these time worn images. How hard is that? Nearly impossible, I would have said, before reading this poem.

The poem begins “Nel Mezzo,” as does Dante’s masterpiece, halfway through life. James Joyce quotes the line in Ulysses and Tarn agrees “Nel mezzo / as man always is.” This particular man afflicted with one of the more disgusting, incurable diseases of his age, is on pilgrimage to the hospital chapel of Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Issenheim, a town in Alsace (France), where an image on an altarpiece there is reputed to have healing powers for all kinds of disease. There he

This is the altarpiece (c.1526) painted by Matthias Grünewald (c.1475-1528), an artistic effort that shared with Mel Gibson’s popularized movie version, The Passion of the Christ (2004), the goal of rendering the Crucifixion in such gruesome detail that Jesus’ sacrifice would make renewed sense to believers. Despite the grim subject matter, though, how can we read this as anything but gallows humor? The poem demands an open flexible attitude, a willingness on the part of the reader to laugh, be chilled, be entranced, always to be amazed at the utter strangeness of human life.

The poem continues its commentary on other scenes, both from the Grünewald piece and another masterpiece located in the same town, with a sharp eye:

And then

If this seems like somewhat familiar terrain, wait a bit. The poem returns to explore further the central torture panel and then turns to the artist who created it, a man whose identity has been nearly lost in history, a man whose surname is not his own, but the “Green Forest” surname of another.

Such is the power of art, returning to image of tree and crucifixion and binding the two figures, artist and subject, together in searing images. All of the passion of the altarpiece bursts from the words on the page.

The concluding stanza brings us back into our own nel mezzo. The poet acknowledges the serendipity of Grünewald being largely unknown, “virtually nothing left to pin him down,” other than

These last lines remind me of Horace’s claim to immortality through his art. In Odes I.1, he claims that by means of the work he has created, he will strike the stars with the top of his head. In the final poem III.30, he claims success; that in adapting Greek measures to the Latin language, a monument more lasting than bronze, as he calls it, he will not altogether die (non omnis moriar). The artist Grünewald, or whoever he really was, achieved a kind of immortality through an interpretation of the crucified Christ, a figure whose life is even more legendary and subject to debate and scrutiny than Grünewald’s. The two figures share a stage of miasmic identity and the burden of constantly shifting historical interpretation. “Mathis at Issenheim” speaks about death; but it is also about art and possibility and meaning and personal authenticity.

Returning to the words of Tarn’s challenge, that we go beyond facile engagement with any multi-layered piece of literature and identify its truly “interesting” aspects, I’d speculate that not every reader would find this poem the most compelling in the collection, but any reader who gives these poems the careful reading they deserve will find something profound to “interest” them. There are parts of parts of parts here aplenty, a spirited hunt for wholeness. And that is an understatement.