The Reaper

This first collection of literary essays by a founder and leading poet-critic of the New
Narrative/New Formalist revival explores the relationship between poetry
and religion, the legacies of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Robinson
Jeffers, and poetry by contemporaries such as Donald Justice and Jorie Graham.

ADVANCE PRAISE

The religious poem of a believer has a quality of conviction that still resonates with
extraordinary power, especially when one considers the poet has taken to witness,
in effect, in a poetic mode that has passed out of fashion.” Those who consider the
bucking of such trends to be The Secret of Poetry will find Mark Jarman’s essays
and reviews of value. Jarman, who took up the fate of religious verse poetically in
Questions for Ecclesiastes and Unholy Sonnets, here collects his prose statements on
the matter and other poetic questions, along with his assessments of contemporaries
like Jorie Graham, Andrew Hudgins, David Lehman and Alice Fulton, and of
canonical and near-canonical figures from a multitude of eras. —Publishers Weekly