SOURCE: A review of Riverbed, in The Saturday Review, Vol. 55, February 26, 1972, p. 62.

In the following essay, Hughes praises Wagoner's ability to convey the landscape and the processes of individual consciousness through the metaphorical use of natural phenomena.

In Riverbed, David Wagoner, a poet of the Pacific Northwest, has broken through to the metaphysical Northwest Passage sought for so frequently in his four previous books of poetry. He has eschewed that less arduous route to the unconscious mind which has been championed by Pound, Lawrence, James Dickey, and other liturgists of pseudoinstinctive spontaneity. Instead, Wagoner has followed Robert Frost amidst the Heraclitean wonders of the “West-Running Brook,” as can be seen from the title poem of this new collection:

We walk on round stones, all flawlessly           bedded, Where water drags the cracked dome of           the sky Downstream a foot at a glance, to falter           there Like caught leaves, quivering...