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Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems
Best Books of 2011, Kansas City Star
"[Jarman's] poems explore faith in its many manifestations, but there is something here transcendent that speaks to everyone. Highly recommended."— Library Journal Bone Fires collects work from over thirty years and charts Mark Jarman's spiritual development as he grows from a poet of childhood and nostalgia through adulthood and the struggles of faith. The section of new poems includes work published in American Poetry Review , Georgia Review , The New Republic , Poetry , and in the yearly anthology Best American Poetry . A landmark collection from one of our nation's most distinguished poets.
"[Jarman's] poems explore faith in its many manifestations, but there is something here transcendent that speaks to everyone. Highly recommended."— Library Journal Bone Fires collects work from over thirty years and charts Mark Jarman's spiritual development as he grows from a poet of childhood and nostalgia through adulthood and the struggles of faith. The section of new poems includes work published in American Poetry Review , Georgia Review , The New Republic , Poetry , and in the yearly anthology Best American Poetry . A landmark collection from one of our nation's most distinguished poets.
- GenresPoetry
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 21, 2021
I first met Mark Jarman's poetry in Rattle Magazine's poem-a-day emails. Liked him, sought out this book via inter-library loan, and learned more about him. Chiefly, that he writes a lot of good stuff.
The only drawback is, the deeper you go into his career, the more he writes about Christianity. It's not overwhelming, though, and it's not like I oppose the topic -- I write about Christian symbols and throw around Christian allusions in my own poetry (how can you NOT after being brought up in the religion?). At times, he just goes deeper than I ever would, is all.
Still, he's a 4-star poet who you should know if you've never heard of him. And if you're interested in both poetry AND Christianity -- Kismet!
Below, from his book Questions for Ecclesiastes (great title!) is a representative poem. Generally I don't care for long poems and find narrative poems tricky in that they struggle between telling a story and meeting poetic obligations. This, I think, hits the sweet spot between the horns of that dilemma. See if you agree:
Ground Swell
Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully—
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand—
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And—what was it exactly?—that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him—
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did—made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.
The only drawback is, the deeper you go into his career, the more he writes about Christianity. It's not overwhelming, though, and it's not like I oppose the topic -- I write about Christian symbols and throw around Christian allusions in my own poetry (how can you NOT after being brought up in the religion?). At times, he just goes deeper than I ever would, is all.
Still, he's a 4-star poet who you should know if you've never heard of him. And if you're interested in both poetry AND Christianity -- Kismet!
Below, from his book Questions for Ecclesiastes (great title!) is a representative poem. Generally I don't care for long poems and find narrative poems tricky in that they struggle between telling a story and meeting poetic obligations. This, I think, hits the sweet spot between the horns of that dilemma. See if you agree:
Ground Swell
Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully—
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand—
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And—what was it exactly?—that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him—
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did—made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.
February 6, 2013
By Peter Gaines
For The Literary Review
Volume 54 "Emo, Meet Hole"
Although praying happens sporadically and without structure at our dinner table,
my wife and I have come to welcome the newly insistent interruptions from our
children—two and four years old—exclaiming: “We haven’t said our prayers.” Last
week, our table talk veered deeper down this path as we explained the way in which
we need to listen to a prayer: we must take into account that it is offered from a
quiet, personal place. We don’t judge the worth of someone else’s prayer, we said.
Its value is shaped by the spirit out of which it is spoken.
Mark Jarman’s Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems presents exactly such notions,
creating an intimate tour through spiritual territories, internal and external, personal
and public, private and historic. Gathering poems from eight collections, the book
addresses family, spirituality, parenting, marriage, place, and faith. I had the privilege
to study with Mark Jarman at Warren Wilson College in the Program for Writers, and
I know from our conversations that Jarman is a poet-surfer, a preacher’s son, and a generous teacher. His poems, and the window into his meditations, illuminate issues that
I, too, grapple with about my role as a parent, about my relationship to my own faith
tradition, and about the way I try—sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding—to make
honest sense of my religious experience and my place in the broad fabric of things.
This collection opens with “How My Sister, My Mother, and I Still Travel Down
Balwearie Road,” locating us in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where Jarman lived for three years
while his father held a pulpit at a church there. The poem begins, “In a night where ice and darkness have made a pact, the road appears.” This path rises out of the night the
way prayer so often rises from silence in the poems that follow. He continues, “Through
the darkness come a boy and a girl, and a woman” who “have broken the boundaries of
time.” The poem ends in renewal when in the concluding line, the speaker announces,
“It is still cold, still dark, just as I said, and late. But not as late as I thought.” Both the
path, and this final self-correction, are markers of hope and promise.
Throughout Bone Fires, Jarman is in conversation with himself and his surroundings, perceiving the unseeable, wondering at its presence and significance,
waiting for answers and writing them out of the fabric of this internal dialogue. In
the title poem, “Bone Fires,” Jarman interrupts a description of a bonfire to say that:
The bonfire at this time of year commemorates
A much older terror, the sun weakening,
Dipping out of sight earlier and earlier,
Its worshipers panicking at the darkness
And forcing the darkness back, sending
A message through in a body of fire.
Here is a human act constructed to do what that road did, appearing in the ice and
darkness of the Kirkcaldy night: it vanquishes the darkness. In this case, Jarman’s
title evokes sacrificial fires and equates the ritual with prayer. “The beacon prayers”
of these bone fires “called light to light,” and “brought the sun back.” The poem
ends with “pyres of memory . . . can make the most terrifying event . . . a celebration.” Light is drawn in the darkness, memory is animated with the shape of flame,
and human experience is imbued with a kind of radiance and generative warmth.
As they do throughout the collection, prayer, mindfulness, and ritual enact a kind
of alchemy, turning terror into celebration.
Jarman’s selected works ask us to stand beside the “pyres of memory.” They
are filled with remembrances of his days in Scotland: neighbors, locals, children’s
games, his parents, and even a ghost in “Goodbye to a Poltergeist.” This ghost keeps
“his squatter’s rights” when a family leaves the house, but struggles with “how / To
assert them with no one living to gibber at.” This suggests the ghost “needs the children who lived here,” and this need points to the relationship—that Jarman plumbs
with such depth—between man and God, in which things unseen are in need of
someone to see them and believe them.
As memories accrue we see enacted what Jarman writes in “Ground Swell,”
“You write about the life that’s vividest.” As the poems from his later collections
unfold, the scope of his project extends. In poems such as “The Worry Bird,” “The Word Answer,” and “Five Psalms,” he wrestles aloud with questions of faith, prayer,
and existence. The questions, and the answers offered, are drawn from daily life
and personal history. From “The Excitement,” we know that Jarman’s grandfather
“wanted to leave his mark on the eternal, / To manipulate the supernatural stuff /
That he was sure was everywhere.” From “In Church with Hart Crane,” we know
that Jarman sat and read poetry in church, “knowing God could see / And so could
[his] father speaking in the pulpit.” Jarman knew that “There was a sea beyond /
The holy space behind [his] father’s back, / Beyond the baptistry that cupped its
portion.” This clear and resonant image captures Jarman’s ability to name, in plain
speech, the presence of the holy in the daily—and wholly secular—rituals of his life
as a teenager growing up on the California coast.
Jarman also mines the divine from daily life as a parent. In “Poem in June,” we
see the poet, with a two-year-old on his shoulders, reflecting: “Sequence is a thread
of grass, / And the years before she was born / And the years she will outlive her
parents / And be herself outlived, can be woven to make, / However tangled, one
network / Of time to hold this moment.” In what Jarman generously gives us of his
own life, we have an expansive design not only reaching back two generations, but
further through the history of faith. And with him we look into the future in which
his daughter will decide, “as children do,” how he lived.
These are the moments in Jarman’s collection that fill me with reverence. As
a young parent, I often pause in wonder, aware of the woven network of human
experience. I have outlived my father. I have agency in deciding how he lived. When
my children ask me about death, prayer, and God, I do my best to answer, knowing
that we are—as Jarman says, and Whitman said long before him—all part of one
tangled network. I want my children to grapple with these issues. Whether or not
their prayers have structure, whether or not they pray in temple or knees deep in
surf, my wish for them is that they will search in darkness for light and work to find
meaning and faith in their daily lives.
In “The Word Answer,” Jarman tells us that “a prayer just wants an answer, /
And twists time in a knot until it gets it.” Through an ongoing exploration of childhood, identity, landscape, family, faith, meaning, God, prayer, and more, Jarman
uses his poems to twist time into a knot, and the forms he uses show us his dexterity. Oftentimes, the poems here are nothing short of prayer, and they become their
own answers. To borrow his words from “Awakened by Sea Lions,” “those who hear
[them] are soothed.”
For more great reading
Subscribe to The Literary Review
For The Literary Review
Volume 54 "Emo, Meet Hole"
Although praying happens sporadically and without structure at our dinner table,
my wife and I have come to welcome the newly insistent interruptions from our
children—two and four years old—exclaiming: “We haven’t said our prayers.” Last
week, our table talk veered deeper down this path as we explained the way in which
we need to listen to a prayer: we must take into account that it is offered from a
quiet, personal place. We don’t judge the worth of someone else’s prayer, we said.
Its value is shaped by the spirit out of which it is spoken.
Mark Jarman’s Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems presents exactly such notions,
creating an intimate tour through spiritual territories, internal and external, personal
and public, private and historic. Gathering poems from eight collections, the book
addresses family, spirituality, parenting, marriage, place, and faith. I had the privilege
to study with Mark Jarman at Warren Wilson College in the Program for Writers, and
I know from our conversations that Jarman is a poet-surfer, a preacher’s son, and a generous teacher. His poems, and the window into his meditations, illuminate issues that
I, too, grapple with about my role as a parent, about my relationship to my own faith
tradition, and about the way I try—sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding—to make
honest sense of my religious experience and my place in the broad fabric of things.
This collection opens with “How My Sister, My Mother, and I Still Travel Down
Balwearie Road,” locating us in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where Jarman lived for three years
while his father held a pulpit at a church there. The poem begins, “In a night where ice and darkness have made a pact, the road appears.” This path rises out of the night the
way prayer so often rises from silence in the poems that follow. He continues, “Through
the darkness come a boy and a girl, and a woman” who “have broken the boundaries of
time.” The poem ends in renewal when in the concluding line, the speaker announces,
“It is still cold, still dark, just as I said, and late. But not as late as I thought.” Both the
path, and this final self-correction, are markers of hope and promise.
Throughout Bone Fires, Jarman is in conversation with himself and his surroundings, perceiving the unseeable, wondering at its presence and significance,
waiting for answers and writing them out of the fabric of this internal dialogue. In
the title poem, “Bone Fires,” Jarman interrupts a description of a bonfire to say that:
The bonfire at this time of year commemorates
A much older terror, the sun weakening,
Dipping out of sight earlier and earlier,
Its worshipers panicking at the darkness
And forcing the darkness back, sending
A message through in a body of fire.
Here is a human act constructed to do what that road did, appearing in the ice and
darkness of the Kirkcaldy night: it vanquishes the darkness. In this case, Jarman’s
title evokes sacrificial fires and equates the ritual with prayer. “The beacon prayers”
of these bone fires “called light to light,” and “brought the sun back.” The poem
ends with “pyres of memory . . . can make the most terrifying event . . . a celebration.” Light is drawn in the darkness, memory is animated with the shape of flame,
and human experience is imbued with a kind of radiance and generative warmth.
As they do throughout the collection, prayer, mindfulness, and ritual enact a kind
of alchemy, turning terror into celebration.
Jarman’s selected works ask us to stand beside the “pyres of memory.” They
are filled with remembrances of his days in Scotland: neighbors, locals, children’s
games, his parents, and even a ghost in “Goodbye to a Poltergeist.” This ghost keeps
“his squatter’s rights” when a family leaves the house, but struggles with “how / To
assert them with no one living to gibber at.” This suggests the ghost “needs the children who lived here,” and this need points to the relationship—that Jarman plumbs
with such depth—between man and God, in which things unseen are in need of
someone to see them and believe them.
As memories accrue we see enacted what Jarman writes in “Ground Swell,”
“You write about the life that’s vividest.” As the poems from his later collections
unfold, the scope of his project extends. In poems such as “The Worry Bird,” “The Word Answer,” and “Five Psalms,” he wrestles aloud with questions of faith, prayer,
and existence. The questions, and the answers offered, are drawn from daily life
and personal history. From “The Excitement,” we know that Jarman’s grandfather
“wanted to leave his mark on the eternal, / To manipulate the supernatural stuff /
That he was sure was everywhere.” From “In Church with Hart Crane,” we know
that Jarman sat and read poetry in church, “knowing God could see / And so could
[his] father speaking in the pulpit.” Jarman knew that “There was a sea beyond /
The holy space behind [his] father’s back, / Beyond the baptistry that cupped its
portion.” This clear and resonant image captures Jarman’s ability to name, in plain
speech, the presence of the holy in the daily—and wholly secular—rituals of his life
as a teenager growing up on the California coast.
Jarman also mines the divine from daily life as a parent. In “Poem in June,” we
see the poet, with a two-year-old on his shoulders, reflecting: “Sequence is a thread
of grass, / And the years before she was born / And the years she will outlive her
parents / And be herself outlived, can be woven to make, / However tangled, one
network / Of time to hold this moment.” In what Jarman generously gives us of his
own life, we have an expansive design not only reaching back two generations, but
further through the history of faith. And with him we look into the future in which
his daughter will decide, “as children do,” how he lived.
These are the moments in Jarman’s collection that fill me with reverence. As
a young parent, I often pause in wonder, aware of the woven network of human
experience. I have outlived my father. I have agency in deciding how he lived. When
my children ask me about death, prayer, and God, I do my best to answer, knowing
that we are—as Jarman says, and Whitman said long before him—all part of one
tangled network. I want my children to grapple with these issues. Whether or not
their prayers have structure, whether or not they pray in temple or knees deep in
surf, my wish for them is that they will search in darkness for light and work to find
meaning and faith in their daily lives.
In “The Word Answer,” Jarman tells us that “a prayer just wants an answer, /
And twists time in a knot until it gets it.” Through an ongoing exploration of childhood, identity, landscape, family, faith, meaning, God, prayer, and more, Jarman
uses his poems to twist time into a knot, and the forms he uses show us his dexterity. Oftentimes, the poems here are nothing short of prayer, and they become their
own answers. To borrow his words from “Awakened by Sea Lions,” “those who hear
[them] are soothed.”
For more great reading
Subscribe to The Literary Review
February 28, 2021
If Jarmin's poems are autobiographical, he grew up within earshot of the ocean, has an admiration for birds, was a child and then a teenager, moved further inland as an adult with two daughters, and has a complex relationship with Christianity and his family. There's also the book jacket's description, if you want to know things about him with more certainty.
Bone Fires as a collection starts with a few new poems, then goes back to Jarman's work from 1978 and moves forward with selections from his other (six?) collections. In general, I like his later work better than the early, though I didn't make any notes about the newest title work so I guess it didn't catch my interest. My favorite poems include "Ground Swell" from Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997); "The Word 'Answer'" and "Someone is Always Praying" and "Cycle" from Unholy Sonnets (2000); "The Excitement," "Five Psalms," "Canticle," "Song of Roland," and "A Pair of Tanagers" from To the Green Man (2004); and "In the Clouds" and "To the Trees" from Epistles (2007).
I'd like copies of Epistles, Unholy Sonnets, and To the Green Man. And maybe Questions for Ecclesiastes.
Bone Fires as a collection starts with a few new poems, then goes back to Jarman's work from 1978 and moves forward with selections from his other (six?) collections. In general, I like his later work better than the early, though I didn't make any notes about the newest title work so I guess it didn't catch my interest. My favorite poems include "Ground Swell" from Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997); "The Word 'Answer'" and "Someone is Always Praying" and "Cycle" from Unholy Sonnets (2000); "The Excitement," "Five Psalms," "Canticle," "Song of Roland," and "A Pair of Tanagers" from To the Green Man (2004); and "In the Clouds" and "To the Trees" from Epistles (2007).
I'd like copies of Epistles, Unholy Sonnets, and To the Green Man. And maybe Questions for Ecclesiastes.
June 14, 2011
New favorite poet.
February 4, 2017
From Jarman's "Unholy Sonnets" # 10:
Time to admit my altar is a desk.
Time to confess the cross I bear a pen.
My soul, a little like a compact disc,
Slides into place, a laser plays upon
Its surface, and a sentimental mist,
Freaked with the colors of church window glass,
Rides down a shaft of light that smells of must
As music adds a layer of high gloss.
Time to say plainly when I am alone
And waiting for the coming of the ghost
Whose flame-tongue like a blow torch, sharp and lean,
Writes things that no one ever could have guessed,
I give in to my habit and my vice
And speak as soon as I can find a voice.
Time to admit my altar is a desk.
Time to confess the cross I bear a pen.
My soul, a little like a compact disc,
Slides into place, a laser plays upon
Its surface, and a sentimental mist,
Freaked with the colors of church window glass,
Rides down a shaft of light that smells of must
As music adds a layer of high gloss.
Time to say plainly when I am alone
And waiting for the coming of the ghost
Whose flame-tongue like a blow torch, sharp and lean,
Writes things that no one ever could have guessed,
I give in to my habit and my vice
And speak as soon as I can find a voice.
May 19, 2012
Beautiful, moving poems of faith and, oddly, surfing. Sometimes together.
June 7, 2018
This collection spans Jarman's thirty years of writing spiritual poetry, covering his work from 1981 to 2011. Jarman's Christian concerns, clear and precise language, and formal acuity are present throughout but definitely get stronger around from Unholy Sonnets to the Epistles. His earlier works are often nostalgic but he becomes more ensconced in tension between mature spirituality and a fulfilled secular life. I find Jarman rewards me every time I read him and this is strong introduction to the scope of his work.
September 24, 2022
A good and challenging collection about faith and childrearing.
October 11, 2021
Interesting Times
Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.
You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:
About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon.
Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity.
How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?
A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily,
And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself.
A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag.
We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting,
Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring.
We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember.
The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop.
To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen
Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us.
And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too.
So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street.
He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke.
Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know.
Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely.
Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.
Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.
You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:
About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon.
Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity.
How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?
A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily,
And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself.
A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag.
We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting,
Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring.
We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember.
The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop.
To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen
Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us.
And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too.
So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street.
He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke.
Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know.
Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely.
Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.
August 2, 2013
These poems are reflections on the nature of spirituality in a secular world. So quite a few musings on the vagaries of humanity and its seemingly futile search for meaning in a chaotic world.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews