Against the Meanwhile: 3 Elegies (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Softcover

Irwin, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081951151X ISBN 13: 9780819511515

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Publisher

5 1/2 x 9 trim. LC 87-27244

From the Back Cover

'The three long elegies that make up Mark Irwin's new book, Against the Meanwhile, are major clusterings of lyric outcry. Irwin reminds us that the rising water is supported by a falling water. The field of epiphany, here, is unlikely, pure, but lawful of a physical world. It is a splendid book.' - Norman Dubie

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 081951151X
• ISBN 13: 9780819511515
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 79