Selected Reviews:
“Irwin’s poems love the light, and language itself. And though I’m fascinated—and delighted—by how he opens up and makes room for joy and wonder, as in the one-sentence “How Magic”—and what a sentence it is!—I’m also often moved into reflection by Irwin’s observations on language itself, which come through in so many poems.”
“To be human is to yearn (“I study the stars. I arrive and depart”). That’s everywhere evident in this latest from multi-award-winning poet Irwin, whether he’s playing horse for his ailing mother (“I nodded my mane/ until this is how we said goodbye”) or seeking spiritual affirmation (“Then it was hard to—yes—think of the distance from God”). In their measured flow, the lines themselves seem to be yearning.”
“Mark Irwin’s American Urn gives us a tasting menu of twenty-five years of poetry from one of America’s most honored poets. American Urn is James Taylor’s “Steamroller” – Irwin is laying down a seamless path. These poems are a rich and subtle accounting of our last century’s terrible beauty.”
“Irwin’s work is full of a haunting magic.”
“Irwin’s poems explore both a desire for the past be tangible and the unnerving discovery that sometimes only abstract words can be a source of preservation.”
Praise for Mark Irwin’s Poetry:
Large White House Speaking
“Large White House Speaking is a book of startling marvels . . .Mark Irwin is one of our best poets, and this is his best book yet.” – LAURA KASISCHKE
Tall If
NOTABLE BOOK OF 2008 – Bloomsbury Review, International Poetry Review
“Even as individual lines and phrases achieve a luminous clarity, there remains a brooding circularity to Tall If, in part the apprehension of mortality at mid-life but in part something stranger.” – G. C. WALDREP, West Branch
Bright Hunger
“ . . . virtuoso performances . . . an intensity, an urgency about the evanescence of life and the various forces pressing on the human spirit and psyche.” – PAMELA ALEXANDER, Field
White City
“Subtlety of ear, of phrasing, of language altogether, and a light-play of feeling, disguise the urgency and evocative range of Mark Irwin’s grave sensibility. The richness and evanescence of the moment surface repeatedly in his lines.” – W. S. MERWIN
“This is a book one wants to taste again and again.” – JOHN ASHBERY
Quick, Now Always
“ . . . a jagged, heartbroken, and ecstatic excursus on the late 20th century, a race through troubled paradise.” – RANDALL WATSON, Chelsea