Mark Irwin – författare

Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry argues that memorable and resonant poetry often distorts form, image, concept, and notions of truth and metaphor. Discussing how changes in electronic communication and artificial notions of landscape have impacted form and content in poetry, Monster redefines the idea of what is memorable and original through a broad range of poets including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Laura Kasischke, W. S. Merwin, Srikanth Reddy, Donald Revell, Mary Ruefle, Arthur Sze, and James Tate.

“We breathe, and then / vanish,” proclaims a speaker in Once When Green, a new collection by accomplished poet Mark Irwin. While deeply personal, the book engages the earth, “gulls, / gray, quarreling air, their ha-ha-ha-ing at our trace / of garbage and carbon,” and addresses mortality as well as the consequences of global warming—how it impacts humans, animals, and the plant life that sustains us all. Poems here accent the lateness of our attempt to control pollution, while interrogating the natural world through myth and the voicings of different creatures, beings displaced or relegated to other spaces, including apes, birds, and an arcade bear that reflects: “I once thought that was freedom— / but how in a receding wilderness no longer mine?”  Sighting those areas where metropolis and wilderness collide, Irwin conveys the tension between the natural and digital world as a speaker laments: “I am so lonely for a river’s one rushing / minute with scuttling crayfish, nymphs, and eddies blurring clouds, not its / imagined thousand pixels changing colors toward forms / on a screen.” These poems remind us how forms of the spirit cannot be bound by technology and capitalism, imploring “how to become explorers, cartographers / again.”

Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin's elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin's poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful. Excerpt from "Letter"Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloudjust as when we touch a body or door, or think of the dead come back, romancing us through the warp of memory, lighting a wayby luring . . .

In White City Mark Irwin makes stunning jumps in imagination to create poetry that is Rilkean in conception and execution, yet speaks to America at the end of the 20th century. Irwin's vision for American is as broad as Walt Whitman's while his language is propelled by changing rhythms, lush music and fresh imagery. As in Quick, Now, Always (BOA Editions, 1996), the poems in White City deal with a past that is beyond recovery ("before the word had become motor"), a future that is ominous and a present that is uncertain. "Do we belong where we are going," Irwin asks in "Wind," "or where we are?"

An astonishing collection of poetry that speaks to America at the end of the 20th century.