Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems
*Starred Review* This is precisely what a new-and-selected collection should be: a book better as well as bigger than any of those its contents are culled from. Confirming the poet�s integrity and consistency, it attests an invaluably unique poetic personality. Jarman has been the American poet of his mid-twentieth-century-born generation most thoroughly engaged with finding God�the incarnate, salvific Christian God. He has kept the quest quite personal, very rarely casting anyone but himself as the seeker in his poems (though he has also written one of the best book-length fictional narrative poems, Iris, 1992). He has written primarily formal verse; his �unholy sonnets� in Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997) and Unholy Sonnets (2000) are among the best religious examples of the form in English since Donne. The new poems that open this book are looser metrically and virtually rhymeless. Their subject matter�people, incidents, and feelings from his own life; animals and plants; classic myths; and God�is what it has always been, and so is the intelligently emotional and composed voice that speaks them, one that harmonizes with those of Jarman�s acknowledged masters, the late Welsh clergyman-poet R. S. Thomas and the turbulent �antihumanist� Robinson Jeffers, though Jarman is characteristically warmer than either of those great religious poets. --Ray Olson--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.