Against the Meanwhile

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.