Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

During the 1980s Jarman won attention as a polemicist and an editor, calling for a revival of clear, formal narrative verse in the mode of Robert Frost, and he practiced what he preached. More recently Jarman has turned his limpid pentameters toward a more traditional kind of preaching, examining with argument and anecdote the complicated shapes of Christian faith: "We ask for bread, he makes his body bread./ We ask for daily life, and every day,/ We get a life, or a facsimile." An appealing modesty of tone competed with a sometimes facile didacticism in his last few books, especially Unholy Sonnets (2000), well represented here. Yet Jarman does best when he concentrates not on theology nor on critical doctrine, but on personality and memory. The son of a minister, raised in Scotland and California, Jarman brings gravity and poise to bear on his own childhood, on adult returns to Scotland, and on the tableaux that many of the 20 new poems build. Subdued and tender, almost without a false move, these pages (reminiscent of Carl Dennis) return to the scenes of his first work, the source of his strength. Readers who think they know Jarman all too well may find an enlightening surprise. (Mar.)