Table of Contents

Contents 1 The Good Night and Good Morning of Federico Garcia Lorca Evening Song on Our Street Visiting the Lady with the Plant The Cold Doctor The Message Curtains In the Penny Arcade, 1931 The Bean Sprouts The Toad Hooverville Nick The Three Monkeys The Magician My Father Eating Ice Cream The Guide Three Sketches in Watercolor Keep Out, Tresspassers Will Be Jailed After They Get out of the Hospitle, This Means You! Home Owner Tree House Climbing a Tree A Skating Lesson Pressing Leaves Breakfast Lunch Bedtime 2 Introduction to a Poetry Reading Arranging a Book of Poems Trying to Make Music A Date with the Muse For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop Poetry in Motion In Praise of the High Viscosity of the English Language Under All Speech On Being Asked to Discuss Poetic Theory Mr. Emerson Tries to Complete an Essay The Three Trolls of Henrik Ibsen Pablo Neruda Catches the Rain 3 The Models How to Meet Strange Women Rehearsing the Death Scene For an Old Woman Singing in the House Across the Street For a Man Dancing by Himself in a Tavern Bad Whistling Bad Chairs At Lunch with the Psychiatrists A Report on the Excavation An Entomologist's Memo to Death 7 Epithalamion Eating a Toad 4 In a Storm An Invitation at the Edge of a Desert Moon Dance In the Fog Trying to Help a Stranger Sleeping Alone 5 Wanted The Lookout The Kidnapper The Detective The Getaway 6 The Fire-bringers Sentry The Secret Agent Floating What to Do When Surrounded In Rubble Sleeping in a Ditch 7 A Woman Driving a Car Full of Flowers Have You Any Questions about Your Garden? At the Edge of a Clear-cut Forest A Falling Tree Burnt Offering The Son of a Carpenter Big Game That Hunter Madman For a Newborn Muskrat Snakeskin After the Eruption Crossing the Divide 8 Self-portrait Ending with a Found Poem from Life Histories of North American Birds In a Landfill Standing Above the Fault Scarp Turning Over an Old Leaf At the Mirror Instructions for Whistling in the Dark Trying to Fall Asleep Beside an Iguana Almost Waking Up in the Middle of the Night Good Night The Old Man of the Woods At the Foot of a Mountain

About the Author

David Wagoner is the author of seventeen books of poems and ten novels, and editor of Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63. He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Eunice Tjetjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from Poetry, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, he was the editor of Poetry Northwest from 1966 until its last issue in 2002.
 

Reviews

"Wagoner's juxtaposition of natural objects and processes with the human impulse to impose meaning shows both his command of natural imagery and his deep understanding of the rhythms of recurrence and resurgence in human life as it is lived out as part of the physical world."--Pleiades