The House of Leaves was first published by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara in 1976, and was a significant statement of intent by Nathaniel Tarn - alongside his New Directions volume, Lyrics for the Bride of God - which set the tone for what he wanted to achieve now as an American poet after his emigration from England. This new edition repeats the entire original volume and is revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

The core of this volume was originally a chapbook of the same title, first published in Mississippi in 1985, and demonstrates in shorter poems how Tarn's work was developing in the '80s. It contains some remarkable work that stands up today, as fresh as the year in which that selection was first published. In this second edition, the original poems are joined by three other long sequences from the same period, turning it into a full-length book.

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

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person. Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person. Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

Palenque was first published jointly by Shearsman Books and Oasis Books in 1986, and sought to offer British readers an overview of what the poet had been up to since his expatriation to the USA in the early 70s. This book is revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

A Nowhere for Vallejo was first published in the UK 1972, and was a major staging post in the author's career, the penultimate volume to appear from a UK publisher before we issued the selected edition, Palenque, in the 1980s.

The dramatic title sequence takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Inca empire, seen through the eyes of the first and last of the Inca emperors and of two great half-Inca writers, both of them exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and César Vallejo. This sequence and 'Choices' were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlán where the author had carried out fieldwork as an anthropologist many years earlier. The book is completed by the 'October' sequence, which ends with the moving in memoriam poem 'Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel'.

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the primitive and the archaic, studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author's successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

The Beautiful Contradictions is an awe-inspiring vortex of mythology, history, and anthropology that pushes the lyric to its upper limit. A vast ecopoem for a dying Earth, a socially radical poem, a matrilineal drama, a Judeo-Mayan-Buddhist initiation, a transatlantic epic ending as a transamerican arrival, a testament uniting science and imagination

Avia is a book-length epic poem that takes for its subject matter the war in the air in World War Two. The verse narratives are stories told by combat pilots from all the major battle theatres, but are related to Charles Lindbergh in a dream as he returns to the United States following his 1927 transatlantic flight. Voices from his future and from our past.

Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out at the ethereal blue ice of Antarctica, Nathaniel Tarn writes: They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the globe: /are you moving toward it? The various parts of Gondwana cohere into a unified whole that celebrates bird flight, waves, and innervating light while warning against environmental calamity. Some poems celebrate the New Mexican desert as it becomes a place of protest against the invasion of Afghanistan; in another, the rising and falling stairs at Fez in Morocco meld into a meditation on marriage, empire, and the origins of climbing. Elsewhere the heroic fighter pilot Lydia Litvyak is personified as Eurydice speaking to her Captain as Orpheus; and in the final long section, Exitus Generis Humani, lines pour over the reader in slow, mournful, yet often humorous, song, revealing the poets' hearts are a world's heart as the human race ends and whole armies sink into the earth yearning for mother love. Celebrated as a poet where inquiry and ethical action are imperative (Joseph Donahue, Jacket2), Nathaniel Tarn has lifted up a mind-heart mirror of our contemporary existence in Gondwana and warns us of a definitive ending if we do not demand radical change.

Alashka is a lost book. It was first published as half of a very large, well-printed volume in 1979, spliced together with Tarn's Selected Poems up until that point. The publisher was a new outfit in Boulder, Colorado, called Brillig Works and born in an eponymous bookstore. Distribution was limited, and fitful, and copies were notoriously hard to come by. This ensured that what was, in effect, Janet Rodney's first collection, vanished from view. Also, although it was a valuable expansion of Tarn's anthro- and eco-poetics, this hardly registered in the wider worrld, whether in Alaska or in the lower states.

The book finally gets its own set of covers here, and a chance to find its own niche, and will soon be joined by some other long out-of-print Tarn volumes. Although some 40 years old, this book has scarcely aged, and its themes are as apposite today as they were in the 1970s.

At the Western Gates was first published by a small press in New Mexico in 1985, and consisted of five powerful long poems that exemplify the best of Nathaniel Tarn's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this new edition, they are joined by another long sequence, 'Birdscapes with Seaside', originally a one-off issue of Sparrow magazine in 1976, which fits well with the rest of the contents. This book is revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry

New and profoundly resonant prose poems from anthropologist, editor, critic and translator Nathaniel Tarn. What holds it together is Tarn's ecstatic vision, his continuing enthusiasm for the stuff of the world...Since the death of Kenneth Rexroth, he is, with Michael McClure, the major celebrant of heterosexual love in the language. His combination of ingenious metaphor and sexual exuberance has been rare in the language since the 17th century...And like Rexroth & MacDiarmid, his poetry encompasses Eastern philosophy, world myth, revolutionary politics, and precise descriptions of the natural world -- Eliot Weinberger.

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the primitive and the archaic, studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author's successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

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.