A01=Mark Irwin
Animals
Apes
Arcade bear
Author_Mark Irwin
Beings
Birds
Bound by technology
Boundless
Capitalism
Capitalist world
Carbon
Cartographers
Cartography
Category=DC
Category=FXE
Climate awareness
Climate change
Clouds
Colliding worlds
Control
Creatures
Digital collision
Digital lament
Digital world
Displacement
Earth
Eddies
Environment
Environmental tension
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Exploration
Explorers
Forms of spirit
Freedom
Garbage
Global warming
Gulls
Humans
Impact
Lament
Late efforts
Loneliness
Metropolis
Modern cartography
Mortality
Myth
Mythical
Natural exploration
Nature
Nymphs
Personal
Pixels
Plant life
Pollution
Receding wilderness
Relegation
River
Rushing river
Screen
Spirit
Spiritual forms
Sustainability
Sustenance
Technological critique
Technology
Voices
Voicings
Wilderness
Product details
- ISBN 9781625348654
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 178 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Apr 2025
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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“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 is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Joyful Orphan, Shimmer, and A Passion According to Green. His poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, New York Times, and Paris Review, among others.
