Marc Vincenz seeks nothing less than to track and sing “the forms life takes / as it vanishes and reappears / then as it dissolves.” 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.” ―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.” ―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.” ―John Skoyles Marc Vincenz is an Anglo-American-Swiss poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, artist and musician. He has published 20 collections of poetry, including more recently, The Little Book of Earthly Delights, A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, and forthcoming in 2022, The Pearl Diver of Irunami (White Pine Press). His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, The Los Angeles Review of Books and World Literature Today. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. A Crest of Memories 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 recall 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? the look in your eyes as you drift aside, then far away in some other knowledge where songs suffused with lilacs and blazing stars help you die of such things? Or, those absent figures orbiting waters, most tranquil the endless returning in the shadow of days where no outside nor inside pervades― comforting like wind through the pines, then that glowing sadness in the wrinkle of water as we slip from the dream. Coming up to eye-level, we open the windows and doors―and, finally, we let the dusk enter.   Could I Be Saying This in All My Own Voices? Cold hand against blue skies Gray reason ticking Premonitions hidden behind language speaking in tongues Night, wise night that brush of death my brush with death in the mask of childhood Keeper of shadows― shapemaker out of nothingness reshaping   First Astronaut on Jupiter The glisten, listen, globular collusion, that crackle. In awe at the waves of peroxide frothing, snorting across the shore. A ring of stones immersed in a spiral of silence on fields of ice. To be the very first stone. and the sunlight faintly steals like a fox behind another ring of stones. 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? and the surge of the sluggish river winds down, slowing vapors, shadows … Listen, you can hear the years sifting through the bedrock, falling into the bottom of ourselves while the earth thrusts quietly ahead. and the murmur of her forest at night and the hollow walls of air, the calls of the drunken dove, the ticking of ants moving their cities halfway across the world. And, still as dragon clouds, these d