To stop life's turn to nightmare
adopt the colorful patience of birds.
-- Nathaniel Tarn

Nathaniel Tarn's newest collection of poems Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers dives deep into the spiritual and physical sufferings of our global age. After a moving overture, the book unfolds in five sections: "Of the Perfected Angels," with its lucid meditation on Issenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald; "Dying Trees," written out of the horrible loss of hundreds of thousands of trees throughout the American West in recent years; "War Stills," an engagement with the ongoing atrocities in Iraq; "Movement / North of the Java Sea," taking flight from Maui to Bali to Papua New Guinea; and the final section "Sarawak," snaking its way through the river and indigenous anguish of Borneo, where Tarn as poet-anthropologist surveyed the loss of forest lands and its effects on tribal peoples.

"A rich temperament, a remarkable, linguistic inventiveness, and a vision both original and universal." –Octavio Paz

"Tarn's work brings together mythology, Western and Eastern philosophy, political commentary, scientific investigations, naturalistic descriptions and very personal love poetry. This 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

"In book after book, Nathaniel Tarn has traced the feelings, thoughts, and rituals that establish what and where we think we are."
-- Joseph Donahue, First Intensity

"Tarn creates a syntactical matrix of great fluency and variety and expressiveness. The fact is that many of Tarn's love poems and nature poems are extraordinarily beautiful and moving."
-- Hayden Carruth, Exquisite Corpse

EXCERPT: "Pursuit of the Whole & Parts," from Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers

for John Olson

What is this self which realizes one night
that its whole life has only had one meaning:
the question of the relation of a whole to
whatever may be said to depend from it—
that most ancient of philosophical questions?
Because you cannot only pursue the whole,
desire it ardently your whole existence through,
the whole being meaningless without the part
and the part must be as carefully examined and expounded
as the whole. If you go for the whole alone,

what are you doing except entering a cloud
so that your task is to become ever more pure
until no shred of  remembrance of any part remains with you
and the thought of any part immediately drowns into the whole,
[the thought or apprehension of the whole]—and you are
now so desperately wretched and one-sided. No, it is the
stubbornness, the innate cussedness [and stubbornness] of the part,
any part, [any part whatsoever], dropped by circumstance
into a consciousness, [birth taken in a consciousness]—
as part of a whole, you understand, you cannot,

[absolutely cannot] do without that part-enabling whole.
It is that stubbornness which links you to the moment,
to the circumstantial existence of yourself in time,
as if you were a note in music, or a bird
in a flock of birds disappearing into winter
and the moment is the only thing that you truly possess,
can ever possess, the very definition of possession
and that possession is the possession of a part, a part only,
indeed the moment, [the very moment], is nothing but a part,
and never yet of a whole. But then, [but then], you are straining,

[ever straining] for the selfish possession of that moment;
forgetful of the whole, that which you were first desiring,
the cloud that sits in the midst of your mind, [your mist],
which would swallow and make null all those parts as parts
floating around in the mind—and another kind of selfishness,
the selfishness of the light-hearted, the cloud-walker,
alone with his invisibles, his intangibles, all those angelic wings
with emptiness at the heart, without beings between them,
all those illusions, that beg for the want of parts,
his kingdom worth less than a horse, [merely a part, a part].

Except, of course, [except of course] if there were a signal,
if, in the midst of that cloud, all the parts were suddenly
beheld, [held] as if holding together, as if there was a pattern
discernable there and, yes, of course, my god, the moment,
[the moment] would then be both part and whole in one body,
waiting only on mind, [the holy mind], to weld them together,
what once upon a time was called the firefly of spirit,
before disappearing from this quest, not once and for all,
no never, alas, of course, [once and for all]—but merely
merely until the next moment, eons afterwards,

when whoever owns the machine stands again at the doorsill
and the astonishing beauty of the understanding is detected
and the knowledge that it is always there—however many times
you are at a loss in the world; [at a complete loss in the world],
to be returned to, in that new moment, which is also all the old,
as if this moment were ageless and could always return