Mark Jarman's ideas about poetic movement provide the subtext of eight books of poems and a significant body of criticism. While taking on the technical challenges of both Robinson Jeffers's long narratives and John Donne's sonnet sequences, Jarman offers a metaphysic of poetic movement that challenges his readers' ideas about the relationship between lyric and narrative impulses.

Jarman's biography might have predicted that movement would be a motif in his work. Born on 5 June 1952 as the eldest of three children and only son, Jarman was forced to move during his early childhood as his father's ministerial career required. Jarman was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, during his father's training at what is now the Lexington Theological Seminary; the family relocated to Santa Maria, California, when Mark was two; to Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, when he was six; and to Redondo Beach, California, when he was nine. This sense of...