click book

White City is Mark Irwin’s fourth collection of poetry.

Imagine an abstract art museum, post apocalyptic, some white walls standing behind the most absurd shapes allowed by the mind, monumental colors, textures like the runnels of oak tree bark, metal and blasted glass glistening greenly, but dust and ruin also, mostly accidental. The sun streams in, rain puddles, moss and violets grow, and grasses. Something slips through the grass. Those still-hung human concoctions were mere extrapolations of the original nature. They were private contemplations. Nature itself broke in anyway, and grows there now with its own quiet colors in a still parade. “Suddenly I wanted / everything the moments, the senses could fleece,” Mark Irwin says in his poem, “I Hesitated.” As if he hesitates before and after every event. As if every perception, every experience becomes a piece in his own private museum. His poems are delvings and recreations of his own delight. Such introspection produces works of remarkable, even exquisite beauty, and occasionally some of wearying, even stultifying abstraction. The title poem shows all the romance of Irwin’s delight. It begins:

                       Shirtsleeved, walking out into the spring, occasionally
                       we glimpse a white city. We see it in the tiny lilies
                       belled within shade, and its taste, like gin or lemon, slightly
                       burns the tongue. Mushrooms drop their spoors, while a faint
                       static mixed with song strays from open windows. Winter’s unremembrance
                       is gone. Flowers walk among our hands. We do not know
                       which touch is which. Sunlight drizzles through green, and the magnolia’s
                       thick vanilla scent makes the mind go numb. This dislocation
                       which feeling is.  [ . . . ]
 
So, Irwin is a sensualist, or even a supersensualist. He lives his way through the “Distant, fossil-boned,” city of the world, which is his shining city, his Jerusalem. But sometimes Irwin’s musings seem geometric and unfinished, like an artist’s first sketches, or like someone eavesdropping on his own conversation, as in “Wind.”
 
                        [ . . . ]  Perhaps the future never
                        really moves, but blows before us, a sheer white curtain
                        upon which fleeting images are screened. Like animals
                        we begin free, but unlike them we must decide, and each
                        time we do, some of that freedom leaves. The space wants
                        us more. Unlike them we are unable to hide. We build
                        houses, have kids, grow gardens. We are a spring frenzy,
                        a picture that scribblingly fills. But the frame seems
                        to push in more closely.  [ . . . ]
 
So, I’m glad his poetry is less often “—Words / in a verbflash torn out of their mouths,” and more “[rubbing a woman’s] body with a page of sunlight,” or walking “where violets jewel,” where “dandelions, their scruffy heads fleece / the yellow air,” “where desire balloons memory,” where “that sensual passing / of events we call the moment” gives back “a warmth I can feel, even now.”

—Brad Bostian
Contributing Editor of ForPoetry.com

Click here to read Mark Irwin's poetry published in ForPoetry.com

Click here to read more reviews in the ForPoetry Archives by Brad Bostian. 

ForPoetry