Ins & Outs of the Forest Rivers

By Nathaniel Tarn

2008

First Published

4.38

Average Rating

103

Number of Pages

3H09M

Audio Length

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 “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.

Avg Rating

4.38

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

54%

4 STARS

38%

3 STARS

2 STARS

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.