Once When Green : Poems
by
Mark Irwin
Book Details
Format
Paperback / Softback
Book Series
Juniper Prize for Poetry
ISBN-10
1625348657
ISBN-13
9781625348654
Publisher
University of Massachusetts Press
Imprint
University of Massachusetts Press
Country of Manufacture
GB
Country of Publication
GB
Publication Date
Apr 11th, 2025
Print length
80 Pages
Weight
164 grams
Dimensions
17.70 x 23.00 x 0.80 cms
Ksh 2,900.00
Temporarily out of stock, due soon
0 in stock
Delivery Location
Delivery fee: Select location
Secure
Quality
Fast
“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.”
Get Once When Green by at the best price and quality guaranteed only at Werezi Africa's largest book ecommerce store. The book was published by University of Massachusetts Press and it has pages.
