Once When Green
Poems
“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.”
'Mark Irwin’s new poems that ask 'how long, how bright?' are radiant with a sheen of longing and urgency.'—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines, National Book Award Winner
'The poems in Mark Irwin’s Once When Green return us to a state of primordial wonder. Even as he faces loss, pain, and ecological crisis, Irwin discovers and renders enduring vitality, 'a little eternity escaping.' Here is a true poet immersed in the necessary work of art, 'trying to mend what matters.' With his astonishing talent for lyric intensity and his imagination as vast as the Rocky Mountains, Irwin has for decades been one of our essential poets. Once When Green is his best book.'—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
'Mark Irwin's gorgeous poems immerse us in the wildness we encounter in language—in love and in life—as we move through 'Time/ with its long-i-engine.' Yearning to reach 'the hidden blank within each sentence,' they teach us to listen close to both no, which is 'filled with shadow,' and yes with 'its wide, slapping ocean.''—Angie Estes, author of Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City
‘So often we consider how to tell the story of our beginnings, but what is it to persist, through language, in a suspended state of endings? To ‘witness a world that is perishing’ even as one is ‘lonely for the present’? Once When Green is a primer in listening to that which we are unaccustomed to conceiving of as having sound, relayed in a rush of lyric language after the lilting of waves and movement of stars.’—Abigail Chabitnoy, author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful
