Wagoner’s fourth book, The Nesting Ground (1963), reflects his relocation physically, aesthetically and emotionally the Midwest is abandoned for the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest, and Wagoner’s style is less concerned with lamentation or complaint and more with cataloguing the bounty around him. In Wagoner’s second book, A Place to Stand, Roethke’s influence is clear, and the book uses journey poems to represent the poet’s own quest back to his beginnings. Often comprised of observations of nature, Wagoner links his speakers’ predicaments and estrangement to the larger imperfection of the world. Wagoner’s first books, including Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), A Place to Stand (1958), and Poems (1959), demonstrate an early mastery of his chosen subject matter and form. However, Paul Breslin in the New York Times Book Review pronounced David Wagoner to be “predominantly a nature poet…as Frost and Roethke were nature poets.” Critics have also praised Wagoner’s poetry for its crisp descriptive detail and metaphorical bent. Robinson, writing in Contemporary Poetry, described the themes of “survival, anger at those who violate the natural world” and “a Chaucerian delight in human oddity” at work in the poems as well. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I’d tried to grow up.” Wagoner’s poetry often mourns the loss of a natural, fertile wilderness, though David K. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls: “when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, at Roethke’s urging, changed both his outlook and his poetry. He was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and was the editor of Poetry Northwest until 2002.īorn in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner was initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. Professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Wagoner enjoyed an excellent reputation as both a writer and a teacher of writing. The author of ten acclaimed novels, Wagoner’s fiction has been awarded the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. He won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and was nominated twice for the National Book Award. David Wagoner was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work.
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