Gondwana and Other Poems

Tarn (The Beautiful Contradictions), an anthropologist, translator, and eco-minded poet, questions and denounces humankind’s relationship to the earth in this timely and grave collection. He has a gift for stepping out of the human perspective and revealing stark portraits of both his fellow creatures and the natural world, the two united by a link that grows more troubled as time and the collection progress. Marked by long verses and a prophetic style that is heavy in imagery (“all louring clouds drowning/ earth to smiling sapphire; bronzed landscapes/ into emerald; quiescent birds now perpetrating/ riots of conjugated melody”), the poems are most impressive when considering the human-versus-nature dichotomy. The five-part collection opens and closes with two strong sections: the first captures the writer’s experiences in Antarctica in 2008, and the final section, “Exitus Generis Humani,” most explicitly expresses horror about climate change, “ego-satisfaction,” and humankind’s disregard for “Gaia.” This last section builds dramatically with lines of condemnation: “Again, they tried to build the future for a human world;/ the gods tried to be gods, the demons demons, breaking/ over & over.” Here is the world untameable and damaged; here is a book that captures the horror at this “haze of ignorance inside which we consume our consumptions.” (June)