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'David Wagoner has won the acclaim of his peers and been compared with some of the most gifted poets in the English language: Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke. "The Antioch Review" has ascribed to him a 'profoundly earthbound sanity', while "Publishers Weekly" credits him with a 'plainspoken formal virtuosity' and a 'consistent, pragmatic clarity of perception'. His collections have garnered Poetry's Levinson and Union League Prizes, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and nominations for the American Book Award and the National Book Award'.'For his most recent collection, "Walt Whitman Bathing", Wagoner was honored with the Ohioana Book Award in the category of poetry. Witty, eloquent, and insightful, "Traveling Light" offers new and familiar treasures from a master observer of both the natural and the human worlds. In a style by turns direct and intricate, Wagoner distills the essential emotions from people's encounters with each other, with nature, and with themselves. Through his compassionate but unblinking eyes, we see ourselves and the world that surrounds us more sharply delineated'. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Man and Nature
David Wagoner gives us a blend of poems--encounters with humankind and nature, and at times, the spiritual.He is masterful and mature in his craft of poetry and narative/storytelling. This is an excellent collection. ... Read more

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Shouldn't be wandering
This book is a lost gem of real fun and zestful living in a surreal world of what could be the West or the Midwest of a time ago. You will laugh out loud at the antics and mouthings of this young kid. Coming of age wouldn't describe it. Wagoner is a genius. ... Read more

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By continually discovering what's new in each day without forgetting yesterday's surprises, David Wagoner has succeeded in constantly expanding his range in a career that spans more than fifty years. In "Good Morning and Good Night", this range includes his usual rich forays into nature and personalities, and poetry for all ages, young and old, amidst a vivid array of memories and explorations. Readers will find homages to the poets that have inspired him, as well as the bountiful lyricism that has made Wagoner's poetry one of our most enduring sources of delight and joy. "Good Morning and Good Night" features poems previously published in "American Poetry Review", "The American Scholar", "Atlantic Monthly", "Hudson Review", "The Kenyon Review", "New Letters", "The New Republic", "Poetry", "Shenandoah", "Southern Review", "The Yale Review", and other leading literary journals. David Wagoner is the author of seventeen books of poems and ten novels, and editor of "Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke", 1943-63.He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Eunice Tjetjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from "Poetry", and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, he was the editor of Poetry Northwest from 1966 until its last issue in 2002. A volume in the Illinois Poetry Series, edited by Lawrence Lieberman. ... Read more

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Strongly recommended compendium of verse for personal reading as well as academic library literary collections
The impressively accomplished author of seventeen books of poems and ten novels, David Wagoner is also the recipient of six prizes from "Poetry" and winner of the 1981 Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Good Morning And Good Night is the latest anthology showcasing a master poetry at the height of his craft and is a strongly recommended compendium of verse for personal reading as well as academic library literary collections. The Getaway: They had to act natural. They had to look like/They were still parts of an ordinary day/Together on the sidewalk across the street/To the unfamiliar car, yet they had to be/Quick about it without running. They had to think/Taking those steps, remembering, knowing/Every foot they could put between their bodies/And the scene behind them, where the noise/Of buzzers and bells and yowling/And terribly shocked voices was growing/Louder and louder. They pulled away/As calmly as possible, staring straight ahead/Straight-faced, not glancing once/To either side or backward, let alone/At each other, and took a turn in the most unlikely/Direction they could think of. Under the limit,/They drove steadily, legally toward home.
... Read more

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David Wagoner writes about regular lives with plain grace and transcendent humanity, and the seventy-five poems he has chosen for the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry grapple with life, celebrate freedom, and teem with imaginative energy. With engaging notes from the poets, Wagoner's superb introductory essay, series editor David Lehman's astute foreword about the current state of poetry and criticism, and cover art from the beloved poet John Ashbery, The Best American Poetry 2009 is a memorable and delightful addition to a series dedicated to showcasing the work of poets at their best. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Diversity and Creativity
It takes work to put together an anthology like "The Best American Poetry 2009." The editor, in this case David Wagoner, reads scores of literary journals (online and print), general publications, and books of poetry, sifting through literally thousands of poems to select 75 that he or she considers the best of the year.

Wagoner, a poet, former poet editor and university professor, has chosen works by poets both well known and not-so-well-known, works that are simple and works that are complex, poems that vary in style and substance and subject and purpose. Represented here are established and broadly recognized poets like John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, and younger and newer poets as well.

It's inevitable, in a collection like this, that a reader will find favorites. One of mine is "In Winter" by P. Hurshell, which begins this way:

I know the crooked at once. How it tries
to circle, catch a sudden pale gleam,
how it sparks a pearly surprise
against the sky, its silhouette
making a little bend

just before the sun is visible. The straight
is harder. No curves, no beckoning,
just unendingly in the place

we're used to. It's not exactly
boring..."

Another favorite is "Open Field" by Phillis Levin, which ends this way:

O, said the crow,
but didn't you know:

I
am a drop

Of the bottomless well,
you are a mark in the snow.

There's "Red" by Mary Oliver, in which she describes the finding of gray foxes on separate mornings on the highway; she removes them to a nearby field "while the cars kept coming." And a story poem entitled "On Mercy" by Kevin Prufer, which begins with a man being executed by firing squad and then proceeds to explore the relationships enfolding the dead man. And a poem by Jeanne Murray Walker called "Holding Action" that's about memory and mortality and includes lines like these:

Years from now I want to remember
how we walked the splendid earth
and saw it. When children read this
and smile at its old-fashioned vision,
then words, stubborn little boxcars

lugging meaning across the rickety
wood bridge to the future, hold,
hold...

What a delightfully insightful way to describe words - "stubborn little boxcars lugging meaning."

David Wagoner has done well in making his selections, illustrating the diversity and creativity that is American poetry today. (And a hat tip to series editor David Lehman, who started this series in 1988, for selecting Wagoner for 2009 and for carrying this project on for more than two decades.)

par for the course
This is just more of the same. There are a few spectacular poems, but Wagoner does the same mediocre job that the previous editors have done. When is Lehman gonna get a Dana Gioia, R.S. Gwynn, Kim Addonizio, Dave Mason, or AE Stallings to bring this series up to what it should be?

Yes and a little no
for here and now, this is how - yes and a little no.
good price good text, interesting but not always inspiring.
Shout to the Lord, all the earth let us sing:
Power and majesty, praise to the King.
Mountains bow down and the seas will roar
At the sound of Your name.

A few smiles, but mostly forgettable
It's been three or four years since I last read in this series, so I can't speak to whether it's an improvement over its most recent predecessors. This edition lacks long poems or anything particularly moving, arresting, or, for that matter, infuriating. At best there were a few that made me smile (among them Denise Duhamel, Richard Howard, James Richardson (albeit with a very arch, very The New Yorker poem), Matthew Zapruder (the ending)), and a couple that were formally clever (Ronald Wallace, especially). There are also some duds by famous names (e.g., Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver), with W.S. Merwin's more admirable than lovable and John Ashberry's entertaining but, by his own admission, sort of lazy. Billy Collins's contribution did not impress me as much as it did other reviewers. A few poems inspired by the Holocaust, the Iraq War or other awful historical events were among the weakest. And some of the contributors' notes tell you more than you need to know. The book is more of a palate-cleanser than a main course; you'll be able to get through most or all of it on a cross-country flight, which seems like an appropriate venue for reading it.

My indifference to most of this anthology may have been biased by the fact that I had been dipping into Montale's early work (Ossi di seppia/Cuttlefish Bones) a few days before picking up this book. To say that's a much better way to spend your time (e.g., in Jonathan Galassi's bilingual version) is a wild understatement, but maybe you'll find it a helpful steer nonetheless.

More of the same
Poetry's inexorable drift toward the chatty and mundane--as well as its obsession with politicized art--is as perfectly demonstrated in this anthology as any other today.Of course, these days poetry just makes us yawn, and we pause only infrequently to waste time building up an angry head of steam.What's the point, after all?Form and elequence, understatement with a nod to anything like a universal audience is just so passé, dahling.Poets (but mostly their editors) have snarked, harangued and marginalized themselves out of a popular audience.

But still the anthologies keep coming, because nobody has the $50 to subscribe to obscure little journals anymore.Poets have to publish SOMEWHERE.And since there are so many now, unconstrained by talent or...heck, restraint, they're dressed up here, ready to be given for the holidays.

A couple of them are even good.I liked Lance Larsen's "Why Do You Keep Putting Animals In your Poems?", and if his title smacks of smug self-reference, his language doesn't."Badgers rarely invent stories to make them / Sad about their bodies", he smiles. And he goes on, beautifully: "My happiness / Is like a flock of sparrows that scatters when a bus / Drives by, then restrings itself two blocks away".Isn't that lovely?

Denise Duhamel's "How It Will End" defies the modern trend.Its universal theme and delicious ending strike a Billy Collins delight in absurdity.Collins, too, is here (isn't he always?) and my son smiled when I read him Collins' "The Great American Poem".Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.Maybe "The Lanyard" is the G.A.P.And that was years ago.

The Contributers' Comments and Notes are, predictably and tellingly, thicker than the poems.In them, poets hold forth, filling you in on that trip to Venice, or the time the cat caught a mouse and they cried.The stand-alone poem--where we possess all the societal commonality we need to relate to it,where the language, form and metaphor wrap us in the divine, and when each time in our lives we read it, we grow a little more--is, for the first time in Western history, a long-gone dream.I fear we will never see its like again.



... Read more

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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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Master lyricist
I liked the lyrical nature of the poems he wrote, but some were a little lacking. For me, a good poem has to have substance, but I missed some of that in this poetry selection. Perhaps I'm not looking deeply enough, but the best poems by David have always been his nature poems, and I felt this didn't have enough of those to form a complete collection.

Sometimes his poems have compelling rhetoric that make you think deeply, and his style is at its peak. Other times I feel there is no connection between his words and their actual meaning, just experiences he happened to write down.

Lyricism, as usual, is great, top-notch, and needs no refining. Wonderfully written if you are a Wagoner fan, but if you can, try to get his latest book of collected poems, Traveling Light. That's my favorite poetry book right now. :) ... Read more

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Read this one aloud at my funeral
I've loved this book for more than 20 years.Wagoner makes the myths and sensibilities of the native people of the Pacific Northwest come alive in simple powerful language.

The poems stick in my head.I remember his ``Songs for the Bones of Salmon'' every time I put a bite of salmon into my mouth.``Lost'' resonates for me whenever I step out into the forest and see the nurse logs of fallen cedar trees, and the salal and ferny undergrowth.

And his ``Burial Poem'' has become the mandatory reading at all our family funerals.It is elegant, spare, and presents an attitude toward death that I find consistent with my family's ecological and theological values.

I do admire Wagoner's later work, but this is the book above all others that I esteem. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

My favorite book of all time
This is the book I will take if I can only bring one to the old folks home. I have read it so many times I can recite parts of it. I often choose passages from it for reading aloud to groups. Sure, it's hilarious and has the most endearing young couple you'll find in literature, but it's the first-person, late-Victorian vernacular that makes it stand out from even the best coming-of-age books. When it was first published, many reviewers compared it to Huckleberry Finn, but I find it much more entertaining than that. Mark Twain would have pounded Wagoner on the back and rolled on the floor laughing over it.After search engines made it possible to locate people, I found David Wagoner. It took me a year of staring at his email address to summon the nerve to tell him how much this book and another of his novels, Tracker, meant to me. He wrote a gracious reply thanking me but adding that he is primarily a poet and doesn't even recall why he wrote those two novels so long ago. That astounded me. He went on to say that, coincidentally, Roy Blount, Jr. had recently expressed the same things that I admired about those two books. When life is not going well, or if you just need a lift, join Ike and Millie and the donkey Mr. Blue for a great adventure. I will be mightily surprised if it doesn't become one of your favorite books.

Upbeat adventure tale of love and faith in gold rush days
In his seventh novel, David Wagoner strikes gold in more ways than one. The Road to Many a Wonder has been called "one of the funniest books in English," and "an irresistible comic romance," but these accolades don't dothe book justice. The story of 20-year-old Ike Bender's trek to the Denverarea during the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush is more a story of the triumphof optimism and faith over overwhelming odds. It's only incidental that theauthor uses witty, appealingly humorous Western-style backwoods-soundingdialogue and verbal sketches to paint an accurate picture of Ike, his16-year-old bride Millie, their adopted mule Mr. Blue and the charactersthey meet up with on their journey.

Through 500 miles of wild andperilous country, past fierce Indians and belligerent villains, Ike andMillie never stray from their upbeat, joyous goal: to be together, happyand prosperous-with gold or without it. With every step, the two youngtravelers face down the weary and spent faithless who are struggling toretreat.

Ike sums it up best as he describes his confrontation with anunfortunate fellow on the trail: "I didn't have no cause to fight and notime to spare for it, so I just left him behind, wasting his breath and notenjoying hisself or his surroundings, probably not even seeing the way thesun come wavering off and on across the sand and getting hisself all workedup worrying about somebody else getting the best of him. I vowed then andthere I wasn't going to do nothing like that, but do my work and take myturn and prepare for the worst and hope for the best and manage with whatcome along."

This is a message young adults today should hear and ponder.In today's tough world where money means everything and the race is on forwho can sprint up the ladder fastest and farthest, students need to bereminded that the joy is in the living, not in the getting.

DavidWagoner's heart-warming, upbeat tale of strong faith and love in the faceof despair is a top-notch teaching tool. The key to reaching kids today isto make them think they discovered a fabulous new road to take on theirown. An invisible push from you and David Wagoner will surely help.

Upbeat tale of strong faith and love during gold rush days
In his seventh novel, David Wagoner strikes gold in more ways than one. The Road to Many a Wonder has been called "one of the funniest books in English," and "an irresistible comic romance," but these accolades don't dothe book justice. The story of 20-year-old Ike Bender's trek to the Denverarea during the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush is more a story of the triumphof optimism and faith over overwhelming odds. It's only incidental that theauthor uses witty, appealingly humorous Western-style backwoods-soundingdialogue and verbal sketches to paint an accurate picture of Ike, his16-year-old bride Millie, their adopted mule Mr. Blue and the charactersthey meet up with on their journey.

Through 500 miles of wild andperilous country, past fierce Indians and belligerent villains, Ike andMillie never stray from their upbeat, joyous goal: to be together, happyand prosperous-with gold or without it. With every step, the two youngtravelers face down the weary and spent faithless who are struggling toretreat.

Ike sums it up best as he describes his confrontation with anunfortunate fellow on the trail: "I didn't have no cause to fight and notime to spare for it, so I just left him behind, wasting his breath and notenjoying hisself or his surroundings, probably not even seeing the way thesun come wavering off and on across the sand and getting hisself all workedup worrying about somebody else getting the best of him. I vowed then andthere I wasn't going to do nothing like that, but do my work and take myturn and prepare for the worst and hope for the best and manage with whatcome along."

This is a message young adults today should hear and ponder.In today's tough world where money means everything and the race is on forwho can sprint up the ladder fastest and farthest, students need to bereminded that the joy is in the living, not in the getting.

DavidWagoner's heart-warming, upbeat tale of strong faith and love in the faceof despair is a top-notch teaching tool. The key to reaching kids today isto make them think they discovered a fabulous new road to take on theirown. An invisible push from you and David Wagoner will surely help. ... Read more