Against the Meanwhile: 3 Elegies

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.