The Hlderliniae

Each hymn in Nathaniel Tarns new collection The Hlderliniae is a love song to the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hlderlin? the German Romantic poet-philosopher who spent the last thirty-six years of his life sequestered in a carpenters tower in the south of Germany. Tarn speaks through Hlderlin and Hlderlin speaks through Tarn in an act of spiritual and lyric possession unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The French Revolutionwhich Hlderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terrorilluminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall past tragedies. Line after line carries Hlderlins hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the minds disciplines and make a universe of its own.