Booklist
Like seventysomething Donald Hall's new collection, The Painted Bed [BKL Mr 1 02], seventysomething Wagoner's may strike faithful readers as his best. It consists of 100 poems in six groups. In the first section are poems about occupations, from that of a traditional Gilbert Islands songmaker to that of the old apple tree (namely, making apples). In the second are autobiographical presentations of the poet as son, student, traveler, host, and father. The third consists of imagined episodes from Thoreau's life in the woods. Various public performers--sensory-deprivation subjects, athletes, howling coyotes, actors, panhandlers, noisy quarrelers, witnesses in criminal court--are the subjects of the fourth section. The fifth part is a sequence, "The Lost Traveler's Dream," and the last features poems about birds, hunting, and some customs and legends of the Indians of Wagoner's homeland, the Pacific Northwest. Written in stair-step triplets or faux blank verse, unrhymed, perfectly voiced, these are riveting expository pieces about the miracles of living--alone, in a community, as a creature among creatures, and as bodies among spirits. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Book Description
As a recipient of Poetry's Levinson Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize and a nominee for the American Book Award and National Book Award, David Wagoner is one of this country's most celebrated poets.
In The House of Song, he offers a hundred new poems in six parts. At turns elegiac, comic, and nostalgic, these poems venture to the seemingly infinitesimal points where people, legends, and culture collide with nature, memory, and action.
With characteristic wit and brevity, Wagoner chronicles the material invasions of the natural world, reconsidering Thoreau amid ruminations on voyeurs and destroyers, slug watchers and moth collectors.
The House of Song asserts Wagoner's place among the finest of American poets, past and present. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
