One of the founders of the New Narrative movement in contemporary poetry, Mark Jarman recovers lost storytelling traditions in a poetry that is grounded in specific places (California, Scotland, and rural Kentucky) and specific times (particularly his childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s). With partner Robert McDowell, Jarman was the cofounder of the Reaper, the primary organ of the New Narrative movement. Jarman has often advanced highly polemical arguments for narrative poetry as an antidote to what he sees as exhausted lyric and meditative modes of contemporary verse. But his collections of poems are more convincing arguments for narrative, demonstrating a growing facility with all aspects of the art. However strident the Reaper pronouncements may have been at times, Jarman's poetry is not strictly narrative but combines narrative, lyric, meditative, and dramatic elements with increasing skill.

Born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, on 5 June 1952, to Donald and...