David Iribarne does not look like a poet: a bear of a man, 6’5", imposing, a tank, he’s a linebacker of a guy. At 41, he certainly doesn’t look like most people’s image of a writer of love poems. And the life he’s been dealt: bipolar, struggling with depression, losing his mother when he was 20, his father when 32, and most recently (though not mentioned in this collection), his sister; born into a family plagued by cancer - his biography reads like a Greek tragedy. That he’s able to carve out of this tumult the serenity, the equanimity, to write poetry at all is something of a miracle.

As the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler once wrote, "Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates." For much of this superb collection of poems, death is David Iribarne’s subject matter, yet these poems are never depressing. In his first section, "Bones," he details his mother’s descent into cancer after an 11-year remission. "Pain is her shadow," he writes, as she suffers through radiation, lurching from chair to table, her body withering away until her legs are "like sticks." Around the Thanksgiving table with her family, she "…doesn’t know/ what to be thankful for." Then she realizes, "…that the bones of the meat/ she’s about to eat/ are stronger than her own."

A good poem should shake us awake, make us see something in a startling new way, and this collection is full of poems that do just that. One of the best is "Jeopardy," where the narrator describes watching the quiz show with his mother who is playing along with the contestants:

I sit, watching, knowing no matter

how much information is gathered

no matter how much

research is completed

the answers to her important questions

will come too late.

In the second section, "Skin," David describes his father’s long decline from skin cancer and kidney disease, his scarred head, the defibrillator, walker, and wheelchair, with barely enough energy to watch television: "…everyday, he loses something." Still, even in his father’s final week, "these days taught me/ how to live/ as he died." Iribarne’s powerful images of death offer hope from painful experience. His are words that heal even if they cannot cure.

His parents deaths behind him, the poems soar in the final section, "Soul," where David shows how facing his fears has taught him how to savor life. A new love enters the poems, and he revels in the simple pleasures of the body, showering in the dark, memorizing "that scar on your shoulder/ that groove in your arm/ that little birthmark on your leg." He describes how broken he feels in his love’s absence, and how "…seeing your beautiful smile/ puts me back together/ making me smooth again." It is here that we realize that his theme has all along been love, family, survival.

Iribarne has worked for years in the mental health field, facilitating group therapy sessions in grief, anger management, and loss, and it shows here. After reading these poems, you’ll feel like you’ve survived a fiercely cathartic therapy session, your heart wrenched, then cleansed and deeply healed; you’ll burst through the surface, gasping for air, with renewed vigor and clarity.

Enjoy.

Tom Miner.
Professor of English
Sacramento City College