WHITE PINE PRESS

Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani charts the paths of consciousness on an aquatic journey into the heart of mind and matter. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be alive preparing for death? What animates the soul moments before death? In this collection, Marc Vincenz trans-navigates the oceans of consciousness that contain all the elements of life and death … and rebirth. In a language that is spare and ghostly, the narrator embarks upon finding that pearl of knowledge embedded in the heart of meaning.

“Reading Marc Vincenz' The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, I imagine I am reading the words of a Buddha as he stares into the vast horizon of consciousness, contemplating its contents, transcribing the ineffable into language as only true poets can.  At once sensual and metaphysical, his poems shimmer with truth, beauty, and grace, while reminding one of the unsettling power of a profound inner life as well as the possibility for illumination, even in the face of suffering and mortality.”

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—Nin Andrews

“With his latest book, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, Marc Vincenz seeks nothing less than to track and sing “the forms life takes / as it vanishes and reappears / then as it dissolves.” Often dream-like in their imagery, mindful also that words demand silence, these poems chart a voyage of consciousness preparing for death—consciousness encountering and probing its own startlingly protean, oceanic nature, “the memory of all things thought,” even in the moment of its drifting away.  Maximal in breadth, minimalist in approach, archetypal and idiosyncratic, these are the lyrics of an intrepid metaphysician seeking to blaze “a trail of epiphanies.” The poems of The Pearl Diver of Irunmani show Marc Vincenz to be a poet at once prolific in his imaginative energies and meticulous in his ingenuities.”

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—Daniel Tobin

“The Pearl Diver of Irunmani is the book of a person who values every inch of the landscape around him, and more, the universe, and more than that, the emotional life of each of us.  It made me appreciate the world around me, and that is the highest compliment one can give to a work of art.

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—John Skoyles

Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His more recent collections include, A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, The Little Book of Earthly Delights, There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, and 39 Wonders and Other Management Issues. His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Fourteen Hills, Willow Springs, Solstice, World Literature Today, The Los Angeles Review of Books and many other journals. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and amoeba scintilla than humans.