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Friday, June 09, 2023

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani By Marc Vincenz

 

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani

By Marc Vincenz

White Pine Press

www.whitepine.org

ISBN: 978-1-945680-60-1

141 Pages

$17.00


Review by Dennis Daly


Slicing through the surface of airless consciousness toward unfathomable truths can excite the artistic imagination into a rather unique understanding of being and self. Marc Vincenz in his new book, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, concocts distinctive and curious metaphors from these rarely explored oceanic depths with their hitherto undetected, and sometimes priceless, gems.


Many of Vincenz’s poems are disguised narrative pieces seemingly connected with a dreamlike, almost metaphysical logic. His sparse, but poignant, imagery belies the substantial emotions and mnemonic thought subsumed within.


A Crest of Memories, Vincenz’s opening poem, details “some other knowledge,” where mortality’s threat and the confrontations of life are held in check. The poet commences this poem of love with a complaint and a question,


When the wind becomes

my heart and I undo

your eyes on night’s

other edge, a bitter

taste floods my tongue

like a nub of tamarind.


The absence drinks

you dry and you re-

call the reasons

for forgetting and why, why

you’ve learned to sleep

in that shadow memory.


What is the sound of love

In this dark hour of death?


Life’s breath takes center stage in Vincenz’s poem Nephesh. Sometimes translated from the Hebrew as “soul,” nephesh inhabits both humans and animals in a hierarchical way. Night terrors and memories fill the mass of humanity with history and godliness. And godliness is nothing if not alert to particulars at varying levels. Consider the transformation that comes with understanding in these lines,


Surely everything is interior.


An ancient fear, primordial

almost. Therefore all this

flesh and bone armoring the heart?


The forest, the ocean,

the mountain—also

all daunting, no?


And who has the most ferocious eyes?


a reclining figure sighs;

and suddenly as if by magic,


at that unsure moment,

everything transforms

and we burst into song.


Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), famously said Rene Descartes in his Discourse on Method. An active consciousness (or thought) proves existence, and beyond that, well…. In his poem, To Discover Descartes, Vincenz exalts being and the small truths derived from it, but acknowledges a concomitant loneliness, both pushing back and profound. The poet confirms his alienation, albeit opening illumination, in the interior of the piece,


And those thousand eyes

of mammalian


longing. O, to sleep

among the scavengers and predators


but alive in the dark,

obliterated in the pavilions


of the insects, in the wake

of pollen and fragrance,


everything filled in and used,

but barely used up. The sparkles


that catch the light of the passing

cars or trucks carting


consciousness, or perhaps,

more aptly, a self-


consciousness edging toward

the warmth of morning.


Dreamtime pervades each of the luminous shores that slither under the watery universe of human memory. Drawing on Past Lives, Vincenz’s poem, which explores the nature of death and mindful life, pictures a dazzling morning in the preternatural beginnings of innocence. Childlike with wonder these lines strike home,


It’s too early still,

what’s visible, not awake,

what’s awake, not yet visible.

What’s audible is running

away with itself—

upwards, the stars still present,


winking into silence.

beginning their dream

of bone and flesh,

of dazzling storms,

an endless text

leaping from planet


to planet, flowers-

and trees- and fossils-

to-be, a power of such

beauty above and below in the pitch

beyond death, where worlds

are repainted again and over

in shadows, where a curious

child is hypnotized

by a future unknown—

and then, the dream

subsides and walks

into itself


Consciousness flirts and flutters. It has no truck with stability. Vincenz’s delicate poem Enchantment on the Islands moves lightly with a looking-glass narrative delineating a beginning, a climax, and a denouement in logical succession. Love’s logic, that is. Or, perhaps, humanity’s interior search for truth. A metamorphosis at the heart of the poem enchants,


someone suddenly

took my hand


and drew me through

the wave of weeds.


As far as the tarnished

tinsel she led me,


through a thin tangle of myself

she led me, no maps


no sense or hint

of technology,


and we tumbled

in the grasses and the leaves


mirroring the quilts

of clouds, to a space


where joy and awe communed,

and soon, we sprouted


wings, clamoring

for distance…


Alone with oneself silence governs in a dive to find the right word, the right phrase, the pearl that unpuzzles the surrounding chaos. Here the poet conjures up the sums of deceit until the right combination delivers the sought after, defining truth. In his piece, Every Subterfuge, Vincenz enters this watery frontier of tightening depth. Aquatic voices stream past him as he reinvents himself as the subject of being. A personal history nudges at him,


How much has sunk in,

bled into your pores

over the years: the salt,


the hard calcified shells,

the ink of invertebrates—

it fills you with clear, warm


blue, and all the waters

in a tight embrace,

the voices borderless,


the tones tied in knots

then freed again, pieces

of a puzzle spread through


another heaven where almost

everything flies, fragments,

plumes and scars


After reading Vincenz’s exquisite collection of poems, the reader rises to the surface of self with an often startlingly new appreciation of life and its sometimes stifled, but then omnipresent, insistent, and musical voices. Here drawn-in breath turns sweet and poetic comprehension begins anew.

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