Gondwana

By Nathaniel Tarn

2017

First Published

3.82

Average Rating

136

Number of Pages

4H09M

Audio Length

A new collection by America’s internationalist poet―“a vision both original and universal” (Octavio Paz) 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 “They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the /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.

Avg Rating

3.82

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

45%

4 STARS

3 STARS

27%

2 STARS

18%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Nathaniel Tarn

Author · 6 books

Nathaniel Tarn is an American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. Tarn was educated at Clifton College, UK and graduated in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Fulbright a grant took him to Yale and the University of Chicago where Robert Redfield sent him to Guatemala for his doctoral fieldwork (1951-2) at the University of Chicago. He completed this work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics (1953-8). Tarn was a professor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at American universities.