Winner of the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

Reading a poem by Mark Irwin is like watching time-lapse photography of an iris coming into bloom: Interesting and beautiful things unfold very quickly. His imagery is as varied as the twin towers, the “digital haze” on our device screens, or sunlight passing through a jar of marmalade. Many of the poems have the urgency of incantations to summon what has been lost. Through all of his work runs a quiet, restless probing, a shimmer, where “the seconds fill us like a lake with rain.” 
—  C.G. Hanzlicek, Judge, 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

In Autumn 

When within ourselves we feel the autumn
I become very still, a kind of singing, and try to move
like all things green, in one direction, when within ourselves
the autumn moves, thickening like honey, that light we smear
on faces and hands, then touch the far within one another,
something like autumn, and I think when those who knew
the dead, when they fall asleep, then what, then what in autumn
when I always feel I’m writing in red pencil on a piece
of paper growing in thickness the way a pumpkin does,
traveling at fantastic speed toward orange, toward rot, when
in autumn I remember that we are cold-smitten as I continue
smearing red on this precipice, this ledge of paper over
which I lean, trying to touch those I love, their bodies rusting
as I keep writing, sketching their red hands, faces lusting for green.

Shimmer

A high-rise lobby mirror is lobbing
suited bodies back and forth while ten thousand
blue screens flicker toward a new ocean 
we navigate from land, but to throw a window open 
with the entire force of your body’s not the same as pushing
a power button on a laptop, or a remote
electronic detonator. Watch this in your room
along with the Ilulissat Glacier melting, the portable
become monstrous illusion. Like the man watching late TV
who shoots his sleeping wife. Just a bad dream,
he tells her, then soothes her back to sleep before
shooting himself. The smoggy stars above 
the city’s flickering lights — fire thrown down and back — just look
from any jet and marvel at the astral make-up, a grave
of aging, prickling light.