To the Green Man Author:Mark Jarman, Sarabande Books In a time when it's all right for poetry to be "spiritual," and all wrong for any real poem to be "religious," Mark Jarman's eighth collection, To the Green Man, continues his audacious indifference to this contemporary taboo, leaping into the dangerous currents where poetry and religion meet. The book freshens and enlivens the lexicon o... more »f traditional American Christian belief by testing its doctrines and language against contemporary experience, placing Jarman squarely in the line of American poetry stretching from Anne Bradstreet to John Berryman.Jarman's art is centered in the profundity of religious faith and doubt. But his is not a narrow world, and the range of concern and subject that radiates from his center is wide: the dark side of the American father; the updated takes on primary Western texts (i.e., "Song of Roland," "Over the River and Through the Woods"); the sudden encounters with animals—foxes, swifts, coyotes, tanagers; the convincing and charming lyrical speculations on consciousness ("Astragaloi").A sure practitioner of the hybrid form of lyric-narrative, Jarman can tell a disturbing story with the resonance of a novel, in just two pages of expertly timed tercets ("In the Tube"). The craft, the confidence with language as medium, is such that his touch is always elegant and sure. He writes as beautifully as any living poet.« less