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David Wagoner. Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. Urbana. University of Illinois Press. 1999. xii + 302 pages. $39-95 ($21.95 paper). ISBN 0-252-02488-5 (06803-3 paper).
David Wagoner can look back on a decent body of work. One of his better-known pieces, "Staying Alive," is an inventive poem in which figurations of wilderness offer a test of poetic savvy and endurance. "Who Shall Be the Sun?" powerfully reimagines the mythos of the western Indians. "Loons Mating" is elegant naturalism, as unsentimental as Darwin, yet tending like Wordsworth toward moral decorum. There are numerous well-crafted poems of a postStevensian cast, such as "The Orchard of the Dreaming Pigs," and some less well written, including "The Pink Boy," which is more Bishop than Stevens. On balance, Wagoner is...