Tarn’s books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. His work is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in the construction of innovative formal ‘architextures’ for a sensual language that has no like. Tarn is one of the most elegant and formidably intelligent minds in contemporary poetry. His books open up a means for us to be delighted again to belong to this world.

Forrest Gander

The great German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s spirit infuses this gorgeous poem cycle that sings of the loves and devastations of our times

Included in the Available Titles catalog

The Hölderliniae

Poetry by Nathaniel Tarn

Each hymn in Nathaniel Tarn’s new collection The Hölderliniae is a love song to the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hölderlin — 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 Hölderlin and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn in an act of spiritual and lyric possession unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The French Revolution — which Hölderlin 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 Hölderlin’s hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind’s disciplines and make a universe of its own.

Paperback(published Apr, 06 2021)

ISBN
9780811230636
Price US
16.95
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
128

Ebook

ISBN
9780811230698
Portrait of Nathaniel Tarn

Nathaniel Tarn

Contemporary franco-american poet, translator and critic

Tarn’s books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. His work is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in the construction of innovative formal ‘architextures’ for a sensual language that has no like. Tarn is one of the most elegant and formidably intelligent minds in contemporary poetry. His books open up a means for us to be delighted again to belong to this world.

Forrest Gander

It is extraordinary, the passion that is the music of these pages.

Joseph Donahue, Hyperallergic

Catastrophe, exile, a deliberate going against: these concepts all contribute to our understanding of Tarn’s late style, tense, dissociative, darkly brooding, abruptly furious, suddenly elevated to a point of dizzying sublimity.

Norman Finkelstein, Poetry in Review

Through this hybrid epic, which incorporates Tarn’s own translations of Hölderlin’s poems, the poet invites readers to find ecstasy in the loneliness of the human condition and to reexamine our thinking about language, mortality, space, and time.

Rebecca Ruth Gould, Poetry Foundation

The Hölderliniae is a self-conscious commune with the great poets’ poet, with his life and work. Through an intermingling of storytelling and exegesis, Tarn, mixing Hölderlin’s verse with his own, sketches out a schema wherein the reader can learn to ‘recognize the long known meeting place between yourself and the attempted tasks that must be done.’

Caesura

Tarn finds his inspiration by reaching into distant corners of the world; he approaches the formulae and functionality of poetry from an anthropologist’s perspective and transforms both traditions in the process.

Andrew Ervin, San Francisco Chronicle

Tarn’s poetry redefines nature and art for human culture, bringing a genuine psychological and linguistic curiosity about the human mind, about what it means to be human.

Brenda Hillman, Jacket