Against the Meanwhile

"When Hegel spoke of poetry as 'the sensuous radiance of the idea' he might well have bee referring to Mark Irwin's extraordinary new volume of poems Against the Meanwhile. These meditations on loss serve as elegies for places, people, and memories given up to history, to passage, to faithlessness. Geological and evolutionary time loop through these poems, weaving together the historical, the personal, and the natural, providing a dazzling perspective that is unique in American poetry."—David St. John

"These three long elegies 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