SOURCE: A review of In Broken Country, in The New Republic, Vol. 181, No., November 24, 1979, pp. 34–7.

In the following review, Hall distinguishes between the rare poetry of “true invention” and the much more common, but respectable, poetry “of the second intensity,” and praises Wagoner as a good poet of this type.

Here is the first stanza of “For a Woman Who Dreamed All the Horses were Dying,” one of 63 new poems in David Wagoner's 10th poetry collection, In Broken Country:

You saw them falling in fields beyond barbed           wire, Their forelegs buckling, the horses kneeling In the dead grass, then falling awkwardly On their flanks to finish breathing Where stems give way to roots under the earth That will let no hoofprints last for a whole           season, Their eyes still staring, but sightless now,           their withers                                         Still, their long tails still. 

Good writing! I admire the stanza's one long...