The heronry Poems

There are birds in Jarman's poems (Bone Fires, 2011), here, as so often in literature, emblems of freedom. But right away, the first poem, Ruby Throated Moses, presents an inadvertently trapped hummingbird anxious for more than freedom, for brilliance, for light; and in the second stanza, the sublimely free artist, Michelangelo, demanding speech from his brilliant sculpture of Moses and receiving . . . light. Freedom should lead to light, and light to truth, the subject, much later in the book, of Teachable Moment, which recasts, in alternating stanzas in nursery-rhyme rhythm and blank verse, the dialogue when Jesus was brought before Pilate. And beyond or with truth is, perhaps, love. Birds and Jesus are by no means in every poem in Jarman's considerable new collection. There are plenty of portraits and self-portraits (dramatic monologues), poems of wonderful travels and sights seen, poems of place and rumination. They are in established forms pantoum, quatrain and looser ones, with and without rhyme, metrically regular and varied. Yet they very often trace similar paths of thought and experience toward freedom, light, truth, and love.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist

In an understated 11th collection from Jarman (Bone Fires), faith reveals its multiform and complex nature through the people the poet meets. "Faith is like fiberglass, a rag toughened by resin," he writes, yet it is also like "water, a substance, stormy or pacific." With precision and tenderness, Jarman explores the sinew and soul of humankind: "Mortality and laughter,/ the sad and funny fact that you will die/ and that you've made your children, they will die./ Do they hold that against you? Strangely, no." In the book's second section, "Believers, Unbelievers," Jarman produces a series of graceful character portraits, including one of a woman whose church-elder husband confesses to adultery, and another of the neighborhood's eccentric self-styled philosopher. The third and final section finds Jarman exploring specific moments in scripture and places in his past. "Tiel Burn" takes the name of a river in Scotland where Jarman spent formative childhood years and which he rediscovered on Google Earth. Jarman's river becomes an analogue of the faith he explores: "I have to act as if I never knew it/ was always present, always passing through,/ on its way to the shifting place of change/ that turns from fresh to salt, and worlds divide,/ giving to the sea its gift-itself." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.