“We write the red book with our bodies, / and how the red book fits inside the green one we call life.”

 

Like the great poets William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Mark Irwin has come into his rich late style. The author of thirteen books of poetry, Irwin’s latest collection is nimble, graceful, and powerful; poems breathing steady on sure tellurian footing or swimming through the river of language as brightly lettered fish. The poems in Once When Green ask: “What is desire?” What is infinity? What is the life force that lives and breathes inside all of us, that connects us to one another? Like all great works of art, these new poems are about memory and desire. More specifically, these poems track how certain desires resurface in our memories, exponentially altering their imaginative origin. It’s a tender collection feelingly built on the power of discovery. The entire spirit of the book hinges on the generative and exploratory possibility of the gap, the pause, the across, the between, the bridge, the open window. Inside the pause, between arrival and departure, “between the edge and center,” something unprecedented happens.

 

“You want to discover that word, but while you’re approaching, the snow / begins to melt, fields green, and the word disappears.” In the poem, “When it happened,” the speaker’s desire to find the word commensurate with his experiences highlights the ceremonial importance of language. For lesser poets, language is only a means to an end. But for Irwin, transformation into the metaphysical realm (why wouldn’t you want to time travel?) depends upon the word, plucked from the mysteries of life and oscillating between visible and invisible worlds. While the poet searches for worlds inside a word, he postulates that perhaps it is “a word that can only be felt, / never seen.” All the senses are activated in these resplendent poems—pitch-perfect sonic images and precise visual ones— but the true feat of this book is how many of the poems speak to this intimacy of touch—that moment in your physical body when you can feel everything going on, the Earth’s very vibration—where language and imagination join forces to unlock body and soul. The foregrounding of tactility as a poetic strategy makes for inspired reading. The book’s many happenings orchestrate for this potential revelation, for “the waiting that is language’s opening / and we stare hopelessly at one another as though we were made of words.”

 

And in waiting, there is listening—and “[s]ometimes it hurts, this listening / close—the word No so filled with shadow, / and Yes with its wild slapping ocean.” These tangible descriptions of “No” and “Yes” mesmerize us in their vividness. And this is the great spell of the book. We touch language and it touches us back. Bells, childhood houses à la Bachelard, wind, the blues, fires, mass shootings, outer space, and even snail trails cultivate memorable tactile listening experiences for the reader. Though many poems ruminate on the imprecision of language, this design flaw is often meditated through hyper-specific scenarios and settings. Take for instance, “In the arcade,” a prose poem where the speaker, a genetically mutated bear artificially built for diorama use, recalls the pleasure of “cracking open a wild hive in a willow log and gorging on honey under the noon sun” because it is in these instances of freedom where desire resides. The speaker-bear laments not escaping “far enough into the future” where the memory of past desires and pleasures doesn’t haunt him yet. The physicality of the imagination at work here is tremendous. Current ecological conditions of lack, destruction, and erosion force Irwin’s speakers into imagining fecund alternatives. One of my favorite techniques in the book is the way we can time travel “at fantastic speed.” In the poem “Gap” for example, a shooting at a shopping mall transforms into a prairie scene, then recedes to prehistoric times, “overlay after overlay tumbling back, centuries” before finally returning to the mall’s parking lot covered in quiet snow. Irwin introduces the gunman’s semi-automatic weapon only to have us reimagine it as a pistol, then a knife, then a stone. This singular artifact shapeshifts through the arc of the poem until the very unsettling simultaneous image of baubles falling from the Christmas tree as “soft mealy apples,” as the fallen wounded. This vexed pastoral image, metamorphosing right before our eyes, implicates us. We stand in the parking lot, frozen in the snow, transfixed by the violence of living.

 

Both poems employ a kind of Ecosurrealism, where Irwin uses traditional elements of Surrealism (dream imagery, the irrational, the unconscious) to explore environmental degradation, interconnectivity, and the meaning of one’s place in the natural world. This poetic mode creates mood, and moodiness. Ecosurrealism’s startling sense of dissonance allows Irwin to employ often grisly imagery with an uncanny tenderness. Poems travel at elliptical speed, lust for vibrant greens, in the hopes of a forever home that doesn’t really exist. This idea of home—as never really arriving—preoccupies Irwin. Not only in this collection, but in his earlier work as well. Homecoming means something else for him. What then? A place of revision? Of further longing? There’s always a trace, a haunt of a mystery in these poems.

 

Irwin is a poet who understands himself when he says, “love relies on changes in time—” These lines taken from the poem, “Astronaut” point to an understanding of how deep feeling depends upon the rhythms of one’s memory, which must be accessed over and over again; to love means to reconcile the idea that things are destined to fade. Here’s the poem:

 

Astronaut

 

Late in the life of our planet and having failed at love, I’ve been
sent into space for a month. Nothing fancy, just orbiting the moon,
which my doctor says will be good for my condition, looking
at its gray seas and craters, along with the solitude of looking back
at our own blue and green sphere, auraed in pollution, stubborn and still
bristling with life. What I recall now is the snow-light through winter’s
skeletal trees, the fur of dusk, the bee that stung me at my mother’s funeral,
which made love come flooding back, and here, this gray feather, Pip’s,
my pet pigeon eaten by a fox. How its grenadine eyes—amidst cooing—
shown in sunlight! Being an astronaut is often like being dead, the blackness
of space continual save for the faint fires we call nebulae and the small
light of stars. Little changes and I become more aware of how love relies
on changes in time—Velvet, our black Lab’s gray around the muzzle,
and, on the wall of the sunroom, my deceased wife’s red canvas shoes now
faded pink. I think back to when love was new and the great sense
of freedom, and now it’s only those distant prickling lights
opening through the darkness of space that remind.

 

The poem, a single stanza, uses its long lines to cast itself into a large space of recollection. There are no long pauses or stanza breaks within the poem’s lines to rest. The storytelling comes out all at once, the speaker adding lovely details here and there, like how the earth is “auraed in pollution, stubborn and still / bristling with life.” Again, we have an activating tactile awareness with the word “bristling,” doubly pronounced since it follows the word “still” from the previous line. Or this strange detail about the pet pigeon: “its grenadine eyes—amidst cooing— / shone in the sunlight!” The book’s obsession with sunlight, wind, fire, snow, and rivers hints how the natural elements are always in transformative attendance. It’s gratifying, as a reader, to see where the speaker notices sunlight or shadow falling because I’m also looking. But because the astronaut adeptly remembers all the minute and intricate details from his life, his medical exile is not as dire as it seems. This displacement from home allows for the act of marveling, of wonder.  Rather, it seems appropriate for someone who longs to feel alive again. When the speaker matter-of-factly says that “[b]eing an astronaut is often like being dead,” I know he will revivify himself into a new remembered life. Phrases like “What I recall now,” “I have become more aware,” and “I think back to when” all highlight and make distinctive the poem’s creative power in recalling remembered scenes from life. Each of these rhetorical phrases are coupled with the word “now,” further accentuating the durational power of recall. We go round and round the planet, round ourselves, searching for the opening where light once was. The poem’s orbit, its playful ongoingness, makes me feel hopeful, despite, despite the darkness. Its “faint fires” and “small light of stars” flicker an eternal flame if one is looking.

 

The visionary wistfulness of Once When Green relies on paradox, as illuminated in “These things that live by perishing,” a poem whose title comes from the “Ninth Elegy” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Like Rilke, Irwin sublimely recasts the transience of life, its fleetingness, into eternal life through his poetic consciousness. Only in memory and understanding do we achieve true permanence. Open your invisible heart, Reader, and read the earth into spirit, step into Irwinian essence:

 

now feathers in my ears, mouth—my body growing           porous,

hungry.               —Just one more step,                   one more toward cloud.