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.
