White City

Irwin has lived all over the US, as well as in France and Italy, and currently resides in Denver. Hes taught at several universities, including the Universities of Iowa and Colorado, and his poetry has been published in a number of literary magazines. The author of three previous collections (Quick, Now, Always, 1996, etc.), he here attempts to give us some measure of what America, particularly the American West, has lost or left behind along the route of its forced march into the 21st century. The way is marked with unsentimental poems, stark as cairns against a limitless sky: unadorned paeans to the buffalo, elk, and horse. The sadness prevalent in these verses comes from a realization of the ephemeral quality of life, the impossibility of satisfying desires that continually renew themselves, and places that are peaceful and verdant but forever out of reach. The poet faces these situations with courage and imagination; he doesnt lapse into abstractions of what it means to be human but instead brings matters down to the particular, even to the point of fleshing out the skeleton in an anatomy class with speculations on its former owners life. Unfortunately, he also succumbs to the allure of the artificial, as with the arbitrary breaks in lines or between stanzas that simply truncate things, undermining the grace of a slow or gradual thematic build. Irwin is at his best when painting solid images of the Colorado landscape, depicting clouds above a mountaintop, for example, as blossoming from stone. Hes weakest when trying to be clever, though this is insufficient reason to ignore White City. -