Since 1953 David Wagoner has produced more than the earnest of a large and durable reputation that crosses regional and national boundaries and major alignments in theory, taste, and prejudice: eleven volumes of wide ranging and scrupulously crafted poetry, not to mention his many other books. He is, simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America. In Broken Country addresses subjects, calls forth voices and self projections, and cultivates modes that strike us as new even though they have flickered here and there in past work as a promise to the future. His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligible and convincing definition of genius. His achievements in this volume reveal an easing up, a more obvious turn to the sentimental and potentially inconsequential nostalgias of autobiographical materials on the one hand, to the external world of nature with its checks on the ego on the other hand, to private and partial as well as representative personae, and a turn away from self-consciousness, studied gesture, and privately created reality.

Although the last of the three sections of the book is the most perfectly accomplished and unified, the greatest risks are taken in the first. This group of twenty one poems features exacerbatingly tender life studies including eight poems of childhood …, several of parents and grandmother, five love poems, and a hauntingly beautiful elegy to Roethke, whose tribute to the rose ("The rose exceeds, the rose exceeds us all") is transformed into praise for the master, to whom both poem and roses are dedicated and who, by implication, exceeds both. And Wagoner's love lyrics (an endangered species among major American poets) are among the finest since Williams's "Asphodel."

"Night, be good, do not let me die" is the quietly inhaled-exhaled invocation of most of Section Two, in which nineteen poems that speak from the lively world outside man act as a thoroughgoing corrective to the egotistical posturings and painfully insecure prophecies of the minor romantic poet elegiacally satirized in the opening piece. (pp. 480-81)

Section III, a tightly integrated sequence of twelve poems, recalls the Wagoner of recent volumes, a poetry of courageous exploration and tentative recognitions, in which sanctuaries of stasis and final truths have long since been abandoned. In these new poems the law of metamorphosis governs more evocatively and provocatively than ever. Not only are the poems replete with transience and continual departures in imagery and syntax; they also maneuver uneasily yet surely to maintain or recover a balance between continuity and discontinuity, progression and points of no return, unmistakable events touching world and mind at once and alike and the Heraclitean flux inherent in the events and us. Principally the law of metamorphosis is applied to Wagoner's various projections of the poetic self and its expressions. There are hints aplenty, however, that this poetry stands as an analogue to life.

With one exception, each of the titles begins with a verbal (gerund or participle): Finding, Walking, Climbing, Crossing, and so on. The exception, "At the Point of No Return," is the midpoint, centering this group both spatially and thematically. The "you" addressed knowingly throughout these poems believes little more than the succession of tracks he makes, which "may be remembered / By an equally erratic, / Interrupted, and inexplicable line of survivors."

The unrelenting change to which the self is "Irresponsibly committed" keeps both "you" and poem always in that formidable, fertile space between order and chaos, past and future, familiar and unprecedented, intelligible and unintelligible, discursive and non-discursive. And so the verbals, prominent throughout each of the poems, establish a syntax of movement and conjugate life as a perpetual "Getting There." Along the way the highest rewards are the epiphanies of change; the principal dangers, the seductions of stasis, in which, as the desert-wise sojourner knows, sycophantic vultures leave nothing of you behind: "So you have to move / … More footloose than ever." Metamorphosis, too, has its dangers. "Climbing Alone" and "Crossing a River" are a paired notice of the hazards of courageous desire in a world without sure footholds, and "Lying Awake in a Desert" twinges with the knowledge that sudden and reckless departures can be the self's undoing: scorpions and rattlers have a way of slowing the "you" to an open-eyed, precise pace and action. In "Getting There," the concluding poem of the volume, we finally arrive—at "starting over"; the end is but a "beginning another // Journey without regret / Forever." The self-justifying "fondness" for "earth's unlimited metamorphoses, / Should help you go along."

The commitment is, among other things, a promise of open-endedness in one's development, a promise we fully expect Wagoner to keep. (pp. 481-82)