Mark Irwin's boyhood near the nuclear laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, haunts his poetry. This book of three elegies explores the nature of remembered time and space--personal, historical, geological--against the progression of time--evolution, germination, cell division, nuclear fission, the decay of memory and feeling. This, the poet says, is a kind of "fossil record" of science's impact on the modern world. Entropy (the tendency of atoms towards disorder) becomes a god, a blueprint for possibility. Disorder--frenzy, darkness, chaos--leads to evolution and evolution to order, harmony, and beauty. A star burns and sunlight falls on the world.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The specter of nuclear holocaust serves as a backdrop against which Irwin's ( The Halo of Desire ) central themes are brought into sharp relief. The time-honored symbolism of the cycles of nature evinces death and rebirth, but redundant and mundane imagery is redeemed by striking combinations of scientific and esthetic perceptions. For example, Irwin's point that all entities in the universe are interconnected, made of the same elements but given different forms, would be hackneyed were it not for the vivid and imaginative illustrations he finds within the world of nature. And so, in the first elegy, "The Wisdom of the Body," he splits open a cocoon and discovers "a thick and formless jell / the caterpillar gone, / dissolved to a fetal pool of white. / Its center diminished to everywhere. / We too once moved in a sleep like nothing / when liquids giving form / spelled out time's possibility. / So too when put in the earth / the body gives up shape."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Against The Meanwhile
April Fire
February Ice
July Stasis
October Stars
The Wisdom Of The Body
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
April Fire
February Ice
July Stasis
October Stars
The Wisdom Of The Body
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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