Walt Whitman Bathing: POEMS (Illinois Poetry (Paperback)) - Softcover

Wagoner, David

4

13 ratings by Goodreads

9780252065705: Walt Whitman Bathing: POEMS (Illinois Poetry (Paperback))

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252065700 ISBN 13: 9780252065705

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1996

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

When David Wagoner's last
        collection, Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems, was published,
        Harold Bloom noted that Wagoner's "study of American nostalgias is
        as eloquent and moving as that of James Wright, and like Wright's poetry
        carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse." The same
        could be said of Walt Whitman Bathing, in which Wagoner's poems
        range from the lyric to the satiric, the elegiac to the transcendental,
        the autobiographical to the visionary.
      Other comments on Wagoner's
        earlier works:
      "Wagoner has the visual
        acuity of his loved hawks and a lifelong absorption with living and growing
        things. A lovely wit and a lively intelligence inform these poems."
        -- Maxine Kumin
      "When Wagoner looks at
        something, he brings it to vivid and immediate life through an extraordinary
        power with a simple name: love. He is as formally various as Thomas Hardy,
        as playful as Dickinson, as wry as Frost." -- Dave Smith
      "A sharp-eyed, even gutsy
        nature poet, the deftest and tenderest of love poets, Wagoner is a verbal
        magician capable of surprising, sometimes crazy tours de force."
        -- X. J. Kennedy

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Wagoner is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at the University of Washington.

From Publishers Weekly:

Like Whitman and former mentor Theodore Roethke, Wagoner, longtime editor of Poetry Northwest, finds inspiration in American experience and landscape and translates it into stacked, searching clauses: "Above the river, over the broad hillside/ and down the slope in clusters and strewn throngs,/ cross-tangled and intermingled,/ wildflowers are blooming, seemingly all at once." The consistent, pragmatic clarity of perception of this 14th collection (following Through the Forest) ushers us without comment or hestitation into such scenes as "A Woman Photgraphing Holsteins": "One bolts, but stops, having forgotten why./ The dewlap quivers. The veins/ of the udder pulse. As round, as large as her lens,/ The eyes turn to the salt marsh and the sea." Several poems center on American Gothic-era memories (red-nosed cops, trained bears, boys who wear "nightgowns"), images kept from cliche by Wagoner's sure touch. A plainspoken formal virtuosity allows Wagoner to penetrate beneath the surface of such folksy harkings back, as when sketching his parents in three-stress lines: "They stand by the empty car,/ By the open driver's door,/ Waiting. The evening sun/ is glowing like pig-iron." Such tonal effects?authoritative but detached, descriptive yet minimalistic, with ironies never quite articulated?are lasting.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.