Holderliniae

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