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