![Gondwana](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![Gondwana](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Gondwana
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
A new collection by America’s internationalist poet—“a vision both original and universal” (Octavio Paz)
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."