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
                                        Still, their long tails still.

Good writing! I admire the stanza's one long elegant sentence; I enjoy the last lines as they mimic lamentation by means of repetition and line-break. But after a second stanza which emphasizes the emptiness of “distances” and “open plain …,” the poem ends:

And they were dead then, all of them
          everywhere,
You told me, dead and never to return.
Love, I offer my own brief dream: together
We wait in an unfenced field, and slowly
Shying along the hillside, the small wild
          horses
Come walking toward us, their unshod hooves
Tentative on the ground. Warily they stretch
                                        To muzzle our trembling hands.

I am let down: so what? The horses die, the place is empty: predictably, “I offer my own brief dream. …” What is this “brief dream” in service of? What does it represent in thought or feeling? I fear it represents nothing at all except a way to end a poem. The poem has taken us on a pleasurable journey through attractive scenery, and when the journey has ended we realize that we have gone nowhere, discovered nothing, retained only the light pleasure of remembered landscape.

If I describe the poem correctly, I may seem to call it worthless; but I am not at all certain that it is worthless. Writing poems over a lifetime, most poets must aggregate years of work at the desk. In those years of diligence, how much time has been spent in the making of new metaphor or the discovery of the final poem? Even for Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost or Robert Lowell, I suppose that a long lifetime may have yielded something like one hour and 37 minutes of true invention—where the dazzled eye watched the inspirited hand in amazement. The rest was, well, just good writing (along with some writing we might as well forget). Reading David Wagoner, I note much good writing, and I am grateful for it. Later in this volume, we find a whole, short poem which embodies in its fantasy something like the third stanza of the poem just quoted:

“The Orchard of the Dreaming Pigs”

As rosy as sunsets over their cloudy hocks, the
          pigs come flying
Evening by evening to light in the fruit trees,
Their trotters firm on the bent boughs, their
          wings
All folding down for the dark as they eat and
          drowse,
Their snouts snuffling a comfortable music.
At dawn, as easily as the light, they lift
Their still blessed souse and chitlings through
          the warming air,
Not wedging their way like geese, but
          straggling
And curling in the sunrise, rising, then
          soaring downward
To the bloody sties, their breath turned sweet
          as apples.

These airborne pigs do not merely answer a formal need, as the envisioned horses do; and if they embody or express a human desire to fly, coupled with a sense of the absurdity of that dream, I do not think that the discovery compares with Columbus's. Yet these lines make a small artifact, not expressive of anything profound, as delightful to touch and to hold as a particular carved stone. It is not, I think, the dazzled eye and the inspirited hand; it is a lucky moment of making.

What I most often need and want as a reader is this lucky moment. If there are hours when we are capable of reading genius, when we need it and are adequate to it, there are also hours when we take pleasure and instruction from lesser work. Although we may love someone very much, a state of continual orgasm would be intolerable. In between the moments of highest intensity, we read the paper, we play bridge, we walk, we eat grapes, we talk together. …

Much of the discussion of poetry, over the last 20 or 25 years, has assumed that only intensity is tolerable. This opinion has a number of unfortunate corollaries: if poetry is only moments of the greatest intensity, it follows that poetry cannot argue a point (we will allow prose to do the arguing) or tell a long story (we will allow prose to tell long stories) or be conversational or amusing like witty speech (we will leave that to prose). Fifteen or 20 years ago, it followed that poetry could embody only extreme states of emotion—and then the poets killed themselves.

By such standards, David Wagoner is no poet. I suggest we chuck the standards instead of chucking David Wagoner. His poems are actually readable. For more than a century, we have learned to scorn the readable poem; if it tastes good it must be bad for you. Victorian Americans and Britons actually read Whittier, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning and even Whitman, poets who wrote in bulk and at length and with varying intensity. Apparently these readers were interested not only in phrases or stanzas which could serve as touchstones, but in books to read for continuing pleasure. It is seldom noticed or attended to that William Carlos Williams is eminently readable, as are Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, Gary Synder and Philip Whalen.

William Stafford is another poet who comes to mind as I read Wagoner's often prosy and ruminative poems; both write poems “of the second intensity,” which is the level on which we live much of our lives. Wagoner also reminds me of a voice which is common in England, the tone of David Wright or John Heath-Stubbs, which talks in measure and metaphor about anything at all, to make a shape of irony, wit, and pleasure—like good conversation determined to be honest and to please.

Our critical standards must learn to tolerate this tone. If we become irritated at what seems complacency—thinking in contrast of Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell—and wish to shout that this tone of voice has “never in its life lost itself,” we might remember poets as varied as Richard Wilbur and Marianne Moore, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick. There is perhaps a fine tradition which asserts that poetry is precisely a way of not losing yourself.

Reading the readable, I indeed find moments of formal pleasure mild enough to suggest disappointment. However, in the work of a good poet, there are other moments too, approaching the hour and 37 minutes of a lifetime's genius. In his title poem, “Walking in Broken Country,” Wagoner transcends his normal competence:

Long after the blossoming of mile-wide, fire-
          breathing roses
In this garden of dead gods when Apache tears
Burst out of lava
And after the crosshatched lightning and
          streambeds cracking
Their sideslips through mid-rock, after
          burnishing wind,
Your feet are small surprises:
Lurching down clumps of cinders, unpredict-
          ably slipshod,
And gaining your footholds by the sheerest
          guesswork,
You make yourself at home
By crouching, by holding still and squinting
          to puzzle out
How to weave through all this rubble to where
          you’re going
Without a disaster:
One dislocation, one green-stick fracture, and
          all your bones
May fall apart out of sympathy forever.
In this broken country
The shortest distance between two points
          doesn’t exist.
Here, straight lines are an abstraction, an
          ideal
Not even to be hoped for
(As a crow flies, sometimes) except on the
          briefest of terms:
Half a step on legs, after which you slump,
Swivel, or stagger.
You cling to surfaces feebly in a maze without
          a ceiling,
A whole clutch of directions to choose among
From giddy to earthbound,
Where backtracking from dead-ends is an end
          in itself.
Through this clear air, your eyes put two and
          two
Together, take them apart,
And put them together again and again in
          baffling pieces,
Seeing the matter of all your sensible facts
Jumbled to the horizon.

Here everything that is best about David Wagoner falls into place at once.