Poet Mark Irwin grew up 10 miles from Oberlin. In a tightly collared turtleneck, green like the pastures often invoked in his writing, Irwin motions to the silent inhabitants of Wilder 101.
“It is good to be back at Oberlin, where I attended so many poetry readings,” he says, with a slight bow of his head, then turns back to the slender volume of poetry at hand.
Following Professor of Creative Writing Pamela Alexander’s opening comments, where she spoke of Irwin’s ability to present “not only moment before us, but mind,” Irwin began his reading with the poem, “Even Now.” An apt reply to Alexander’s accolade, the poem occurs in the moments of a single walk in the park, yet tells an entire saga of youth and time’s elapse.
Lines like: “Where you talked of the past, picking chunks of time like invisible / fruit and I could feel the rivers and trees engrave us,” speak to Irwin’s twinning of the natural world and ideas of transcription, his metaphors often evoking a sense of imminence. “Even Now,” like other poems in his most recent of three books, White City, melds surrealist images such as, “I watched / you reach for a glass dissolving in air,” and realist detail to create a poetry fit to Irwin’s raspy voice and finely lined gaze.
Interspersing languid anecdotes of growing up in Ohio with passages of romantic poetry and luminous description of his new home in Colorado, a desert ranch he calls “so insolent it forces you to confront self,” before pausing and pointing out that, “poetry should always force you to confront self,” Irwin led us though White City.
A sense of the unknown floods the two-time Pushcart Prize winner’s third book. We see images of light and bodies, “the bleached litter of bones…chalky cliffs of the skull,” create vast spaces, where it is possible to watch “sunlight on flesh turn to fire” — and believe.
Before reading “X,” a poem wherein the speaker reveals that “whenever I see people touch, I place a small white x where they stood,” Irwin said that he has always “struggled with having a body.” It is these poignant revelations that ground Irwin’s language of air and fire, ecstasy, and light.
At times, however, Irwin’s even-measured speech failed to match the magnitude of his poetry. Abstract but beautifully expressive ideas lost vibrancy in tones better reserved for table-clothed dinner parties.
Born in Minnesota in 1953, Irwin has won several national awards as well as two Colorado Recognition awards. His work has been widely published in literary magazines ranging from The Atlantic and American Poetry Review to The Kenyon Review and Oberlin’s own highly acclaimed literary journal, Field.
Irwin has taught at several universities, including the highly ranked writing program at the University of Iowa, as well as Ohio University and the University of Colorado.
Dedicated to his late father, White City tells of a space between the ethereal and the tactile, its poems, “looking into both worlds,” as Irwin said before reading one he wrote about witnessing the overturning of a cigar truck.
“I was a boy watching a truck overturn and cigars fall all across the landscape,” he said, recounting the moment when his father and all the other men crossing the highway that evening and stepped out from their cars and picked the fallen blunts from damp roadside grass. Looking down at his papers, he remembers the lighting of so many tiny fires and the sweet-smoke air.
In the midst of a pause during which Irwin, on his two-step Wilder podium, searched for a specific poem, Alexander requested another poem, “Sparrow” from White City.
As with many of Irwin’s other poems, “Sparrow” embeds larger-than-life ideas into a single interaction of the senses, forcing the reader to go back and reread to catch Irwin’s meaning.

For this reason, it appeared that many members of the audience weren’t as taken with Irwin’s performance as they had anticipated, based on earlier readings of his work.
Like Irwin’s raspy tenor and the beautifully illuminated close-up of an AIDS patient’s sarcomas that graces the cover of White City, “Sparrow” tempers lush appreciation for something we understand with urgency.