Poetry Criticism | Wagoner, David - Donald Hall (essay date 1979)

Donald Hall (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: A review of In Broken Country, in The New Republic, Vol. 181, No., November 24, 1979, pp. 34–7.

[In the following review, Hall distinguishes between the rare poetry of “true invention” and the much more common, but respectable, poetry “of the second intensity,” and praises Wagoner as a good poet of this type.]

Here is the first stanza of “For a Woman Who Dreamed All the Horses were Dying,” one of 63 new poems in David Wagoner's 10th poetry collection, In Broken Country:

You saw them falling in fields beyond barbed
          wire,
Their forelegs buckling, the horses kneeling
In the dead grass, then falling awkwardly
On their flanks to finish breathing
Where stems give way to roots under the earth
That will let no hoofprints last for a whole
          season,
Their eyes still staring, but sightless now,
          their withers...

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