Sometimes you can swim with your eyes closed and learn something. You almost have to close your eyes and get ready to breathe into Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani. If you dive in with your eyes open they will sting and you can’t see a thing.
The book is organized into six different movements, beginning with “An Un Chartable Truth,” and ending with “Grown from Sand.” Each stroke taken throughout these movements is in part an escalation backward, a seesaw on a cliff, a microscope in hand, a telescope of vision, and a great leap forward. One senses a brush with death but beating it at its own game here. This is not the music of the loud drum set, but the spoken song that has its own lines and sometimes rhymes within a poem, across poems in the book, with a poem on Jupiter:
Your heart is torn
as a fleeting moment
of fire burns the atmosphere
from this Milky Way of young souls.
But where, you ask, is the driftwood
picking up on the shore?
There is a taughtness in these poems that crosses Stevens and the late Vincenz’s book has the ease of background noise daydreams while humming around at your hundredth World’s Fair. At the same time, each poem has the clarity of being spoken to alone in a quiet, well-lit room that has been made for sound to discover:
the heart of a word
slithering toward small truths
under a starry sky.
He has been there. Vincenz was born Hong Kong, grew up in Switzerland, has lived in the UK, the deep South, and ran a manufacturing outfit in China. He has been to Irunmani and this is as close as you will ever get, or so you hope. In this book, Vincenz plunges unaided to the bottom of the ocean, his memory of all things. Underwater in this book your heart rate drops to half its resting value even though he has gone deep. When Vincenz surfaces from the ocean, he puckers his lip, opens his mouth and slightly shares a low whistle slowly in expiration:
Heavenly, the universes
inside the mind;
devilish, each
single word.
Between the movements and poems are lines in italics, narration perhaps, whispering consciousness perhaps. One says “Behind this canvas there is another sea of still and clear blue,” or later, “How bitter the taste of this breeze,” and toward the end, “This is forever: the tuna chasing minnows.” You will not find an Irunmani, don’t even try. This is as close as you want to get.
Vincenz’s music can have a sight similar to say Robert Kelly but Vincenz’s poems don’t process trace to troubadours but rather to the deep fountains of the Silk Road. From the “Wheels of Industry” Vincenz is:
Nailed to the clouds,
the dying float above.
Drained, we emerge
from stained glass
among the trees
raising arms, singing.
Vincenz has more than a score of poetry books. Although each time you read one you know it is him, this one is yet another very different song. In this one he takes us deep into the questions that never escape our minds. In temperament and sound, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani is closest to Vincenz’s 2015 book, Becoming the Sound of Bees:
Voices are rigging and sails
that creak and snap, and through
knots and cracks above, the light,
finding little access, ceaselessly bemoans.
Whereas the bees are live and among us, in The Pearl Diver of Irunmani you are not quite sure where you are but there is an oceanic feeling where you feel as this you have been there before, or are about to go. In his The Little Book of Earthly Delights from 2021 we are clearly on earth, with echoes of Asia where:
The sailboats catch
The shorewind
To the ends of the earth.
It is the ends of the earth where Vincenz dives in this time. In “The Little Book” he is the landscape artist like a Kenneth Rexroth translation but with deep breaths of his inquiring eye. “Pearl Diver” goes into a deeper pool, leaving the earth’s surface and the reality of life behind. Some of these poems get dangerously close to seeing and feeling what the living don’t want to see and feel. But in the end, Vincenz finds the driftwood and comes ashore.
The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, by Marc Vincenz. Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, April 2023. 120 pages. $17.00, paper.
Kevin Gallagher is a poet, publisher, and political economist living in Boston, Massachusetts. His latest books of poems are And Yet it Moves and The Wild Goose. He edits spoKe, and works as a professor of global development policy at Boston University.
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