The thirty hymns of The Hoelderliniae are inspired by the intricacies and transcendent humanity of Beethoven's last quartets. Nathaniel Tarn's new book opens with a biographical note on the "Poet of Poets," Friedrich Hoelderlin, setting the scene and introducing the doomed love of the poet's life, Diotima; it ends in the Neckar River, the river of Hoelderlin's birth and death. Through affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through Hoelderlin, and Hoelderlin speaks through Tarn. 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 those 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.
Industry Reviews
"The Hoelderliniae is a self-conscious commune with the great poets' poet, with his life and work. Through an intermingling of storytelling and exegesis, Tarn, mixing Hoelderlin'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'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
"Tarn's lyric voice is a special one in today's poetry: his 'I' is not the more familiar first-person confessional nor is it stylized and aloof; but it is a voice able to speak on the poet's own ground or through other personae, as few in English have done so well since Yeats and Pound." -- Ken Bullock - The Berkeley Daily Planet
"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 one means for us to be delighted again to belong to this world." -- Forrest Gander
"Through this hybrid epic, which incorporates Tarn's own translations of Hoelderlin'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
"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
"It is extraordinary, the passion that is the music of these pages." -- Joseph Donahue - Hyperallergic
