David Wagoner seems to me one of our best poets, perhaps one of the best we have ever had in this country. I say “perhaps” because there is so much one might expect him still to explore, to attempt, that is as yet untouched in his verse, for Wagoner is a young man, his gifts are great, his commitment to craft exemplary. Which is to say, like any poet, Wagoner has his limitations, and, like the best poets, these limitations seem more a function of his strengths than a reflection of fundamental weaknesses in vision, feeling, or invention.

Wagoner is certainly not the sort of poet who ought to be popular with academic intellectuals, and in fact he seems to have caught on much more rapidly with his fellow poets than with the literary critics. For Wagoner's verse presents few obstacles to the intelligence; one needs no special glossary to read his poems with pleasure, for they rest upon no mythologies, personal or traditional. Neither, at the same time, can Wagoner be expected to appeal to that vast audience of occasional readers to whom, say, Frost so appealed, for Wagoner's poems do not flatter mundane notions of eccentricity, or take us on easeful journeys into the interiors of the night. There is a brilliantly daring, erratic quality in Wagoner's verse, a nearly explosive, impending presence that one feels only in very few of Frost's poems. And the darkness, the silences in Wagoner are always drawing toward a nexus of fear and sensation, as in a dream the edges of which are always perfectly lucid, clearly defined, but which slip and give way to something in which they participate only partially.

To speak of the dream, though, in connection with Wagoner, may be to foster an altogether mistaken impression of his practice, for there is nothing merely or even largely fuzzy about his verse. The contours of his thought are unmistakable, and his concern for the hard spine of language is something one cannot miss. Nor, though one is tempted to do so, can one properly speak of the happy chance in Wagoner's poetry, as one must in discussing Dr. Williams' verse, for example. Associations in Wagoner are inventive, but hardly what one would call free, and the quality of dream is more a matter of weirdness, of vagueness of feeling, than of insufficiency in the various metaphoric equivalences, or of quirky disjunctions in argument. One thing Wagoner refuses to do is to conjure images as from the deep wellsprings of dream, and thereby to suggest identities, only to dismiss them all as meanderings of a diseased psyche, or as privileged metaphors such as may be identified with indulgent emotional states like the dream-trance of morbidly preoccupied individuals. Wagoner has his troubles staying alive—don’t we all—and he dreams a good deal about a control of his surroundings, and of his responses to it, that seems always to elude him, but Wagoner's commitment to life, to the hard objects and choices of this world, is always more tenacious finally than the ambience of dream.

What one cannot but feel, coming away from Wagoner, is that whatever he touches, no matter how small, how minor, he alters, not in its dimensions so much as in the sheer quality and force of its presence. This holds true as well for objects as for human types and for tropes of language that had become so familiar we did not think they could any longer matter. Here is one of those poems, set in Wagoner's glorious Pacific Northwest, that make us marvel. This man is a tightrope walker, we want to exclaim, an acrophobiac genius of dizzying heights, a man who can look down over the sheer edge of himself and laugh even as he clings for dear life. How maudlin, he seems to say, are life's attempts to validate for us our own fears, the anxieties we generate out of our own gaping desert places and little persisting indifferences:

“Observations From the Outer Edge”

I pass the abrupt end of the woods, and stop.
I’m standing on a cliff as sheer as a step
Where the ground, like the ground floor of a nightmare,
Has slipped a notch six hundred rocky feet
And left itself in the lurch. My shoes go dead.
Not looking yet, I let my heart sneak back,
But feel like the fall-guy ending a Western,
The heavy, bound to topple from the edge
And disappear with terrible gravity.
I put my hand out in the separate air
With nothing under it, but it feels nothing.
This is no place for putting my foot down,
So I shout my name, but can’t scare up an echo.
No one inside this canyon wants to be me.
I manage to look down. Not much to envy:
The silent, immobile rapids, the toy pines,
A fisherman stuck in the shallows like an agate—
A world so far away, it could quit moving
And I wouldn’t know the difference. I’ve seen it before
At the ends of hallways, the far sides of windows,
Shrinking from sight. Down is no worse than across.
Whether it’s sky, horizon, or ground zero,
A piece of space will take whatever comes
From any direction—climbing, walking, or falling.
I remember a newsreel—a man holding a baby
Over the Grand Canyon on a stick:
The kid hung on and grinned for the camera.
I grab the nearest branch just to make sure
It isn’t death down there, looking like hell.
Even a mountain goat will go to pieces
Standing on glass suspended in the air,
But man created with a jerkier balance
Can learn to fix his eyes on a safe place.
Trembling somewhere,
The acrophobiac Primum Mobile
Clings to his starry axle, staring sideways.

We pick out any number of Wagoner's really inspired moments in this poem, and we see that the man has the power to transfigure through language, to evoke meaning where we had thought there was none: “This is no place for putting my foot down”; “just to make sure it isn’t death down there, looking like hell.” There is wit here, not the corrosive wit we admire in Eliot, nor the savage irony of a Robert Lowell, but a gentle wit, aware of its own dignity even as it titters in mock self-regard. The emotional consequence of most ironies that turn back upon themselves is pathos, but Wagoner manages to avoid it—it is not a sentiment with which he feels wholly comfortable. “No one inside this canyon wants to be me,” he says, but he achieves a distance from the center of himself that is not only healthy, in the broadest sense, but appropriate given the quickness of his sensibility, his inclination to play for its own sake. There is, then, something of the spectator in Wagoner's approach to the materials of his universe, to the range of problems and confusions he finds he must engage. Given the seriousness of Wagoner's concerns, in fact, and the level of intensity one finds in the poems, the number of carnival antics and really far-fetched interpolations is nothing less than amazing, as is the facility with which Wagoner assimilates them to the consistently whole-cloth fabric of his verse. How suddenly he can reach out and haul in “a man holding a baby / Over the Grand Canyon on a stick.” And one does not even think to ask whether it works. It is no metaphysical conceit, no attempt to yoke together any wildly disparate notions with violence. Wagoner's imagination is at ease with the pluralities of human and elemental behaviors, and he reaches out into realms of experience as lovers reach to touch what they love. Wagoner is in love with creation as few poets since Whitman have been, and his imagination is alert to the possibilities of ever-new appropriations.

Loving this world as he does, or as his poems would indicate he does, what is it that makes Wagoner less happy than he might be? Perhaps it is that, being what it is, the world must always disappoint our best hopes, and its own best representations, so that if there is wisdom in acknowledging what is all too clear, such wisdom is hardly consolation for those abrupt dismissals of blitheness to which life frequently directs us. It is all hardly rational, of course, and Wagoner would be the last to say in his poems “This is the way it is, this is the way the world will go.” What is it, after all, that possesses a man to drag up recently felled and dying trees, squeeze them into his car, and replant them feverishly forty miles away at his home, digging all night in the dark? Such is the subject of the poem “Working Against Time,” a strangely haunting poem that reports a passion without explaining it, that evokes a concern for life as against death without attempting to justify its application in any context, or for all time. What we feel in Wagoner's poem is the life of an impulse that cannot withhold itself from anything that comes within its purview. It may not, finally, be really terrible that trees are cut down to make way for roads, or houses, but it is surely a little sad that potentially useful things go to ruin, and that beauty, be it no more than the beauty of little things, goes out of the world, no matter how righteous the causes. Just so, in Wagoner's recent poems on shoplifters, hold-up men, burglars, bums, included in the final section of this volume, he does not deplore the social conditions that lead men to a life of crime or indignity. What he bemoans is nothing so broad as the breakdown of cultural institutions, or the tragic limitations of man as a being, but the peculiar and very specific ways in which men, not all men but some, approach life with trepidation, are alienated from the small pleasures that are all we have. It is far from a desperate or terrible vision. What distinguishes it is its sense of life as motion seeking at all points its appropriate equilibrium. Its goal and standard is neither stasis nor perfect balance, but the ability to keep going without ever giving too much of itself, or the sustaining organism, away. What Wagoner wants is to participate in nature, in the life of his fellows, without too much encumbering himself with the treasures he finds along the way; to be at once part and apart. Always the relationship of any man to the life around him is uncertain—and this is good, it is necessary, says Wagoner, for we endure by knowing how to stay alive, and this is no simple matter, but requires constant attention borne of doubt. Thus, as he says in the title poem of his 1966 volume Staying Alive, the great bulk of which is included in these selected poems, “There may even come, on some uncanny evening, / A time when you’re warm and dry, well-fed, not thirsty, / Uninjured, without fear, / When nothing, either good or bad, is happening. / This is called staying alive. It’s temporary. / What occurs after / Is doubtful. You must always be ready for something to come bursting / Through the far edge of a clearing, running toward you, / Grinning from ear to ear / And hoarse with welcome.”

Wagoner really came into his own as a poet with the volume Staying Alive, though a number of poems in his earlier volumes have held up very well indeed. The pieces he reprints from A Place to Stand (1958) are in several instances delightful, even memorable, but, somehow, and not surprisingly, derivative. A poem like “Words Above a Narrow Entrance” is distinctly Roethkean, though without the abandoned rhythms and full vitality of Roethke's mature work. Despite fine echoes of Roethke—“The country that seemed / Malevolence itself / Has gone back from the heart”—the effects are rather tame. More characteristic, I suppose, are the echoes from the deep image poetry of Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and others associated with them. In “Murder Mystery” we move from a spirited recitation of particulars, a light-fantastic cataloguing of conventions associated with the genre, to this concluding stanza:

Meanwhile, in another place—their figures cold,
Both turned to shadows by a single pain,
Bloodless together—the killer and the slain
Have kissed each other in the wilderness,
Touching soft hands and staring at the world.

The detachment of such a stanza from the preceding material is only too clear. Surely it does deepen the impact of the poem, but we are ultimately uncertain that the concluding effects are justified by the poem as a whole. This is the problem we have to deal with in considering Bly and his friends, even today.

The poems in Wagoner's The Nesting Ground (1963) do not seem to me to represent an improvement on the earlier volume. They are over-written and contrived, lifted by an insistent carnival playfulness that makes them appear almost vaporous by comparison with the solidity and intensity of the 1966 volume. Even the more somber poems in The Nesting Ground seem overly cautious, not so much felt as willed into being, seamed together with heavy thread and thick fingers.

So many of the poems in Staying Alive, and also some of Wagoner's more recent works, succeed, and move one to think of them again and again, that it is hard to know which ought especially to be singled out. But I shall select the following: “Staying Alive,” “Going to Pieces,” “Walking in the Snow,” “A Valedictory to Standard Oil of Indiana,” “A Room with a View,” “Fire by the River,” “Nine Charms against the Hunter.” Reading these, and considering the full breadth of Wagoner's achievement, is to be reminded that the best poetry consistently defies our predictions of what it ought to be, that the modern poetic sensibility, attuned to the worst and to the best possibilities of its time, need not inhabit anything like an urban universe to know what we have come to. Wagoner's is a poetry of consolation, that genuinely lifts the spirit that greets it, for it assures us that, if reality is not what we should like it to be, it may be as we feel it to be, as the poem shapes the intransigeant particulars of its vision. What Wagoner has sought, and evoked, is a most satisfying interaction between the poetic and the anti-poetic, a dialectic in which the imagination can learn to play with and control its own remorse.