Wagoner, David - R. W. Flint (essay date 1980)
R. W. Flint (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: A review of In Broken Country, in Parnassus, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1980, pp. 58–62.
[In the following excerpt, Flint celebrates Wagoner's nature/wilderness poetry.]
No sooner had Frost died than the Great West from Chicago to Seattle, Calgary to Santa Fe, was suddenly taken to be the one remaining continental reservoir of fresh local color. If the phrase brings a blush to your cheek, dear reader, you help make my point. You are one of those who settle for action, character, atmosphere, or unfresh local color used in new ways or seen in new lights. When Frost left the scene, only New York City was offering serious competition to the West. Elsewhere one either sounded like Frost, or busted a gut not to (which revived the Old Man willy-nilly), or dispensed with local color altogether by treating nature blandly and generically—like Wendell Berry composing his rather Augustan moralized homilies about...
[The entire page is 1774 words long]
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