Afterwords // David Wagoner at Seattle Arts & Lectures
by Jennifer Crowder Poetry Northwest Contributor David Wagoner appeared January 16, 2013 as part of SAL’s Poetry Series, reading from After the Point of No Return, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). An audience of devotees nearly filled the Nordstrom Recital Hall and Wagoner, an icon among the northwest poetry community, did not disappoint. The poems in this latest collection are reflective in a manner that only a half-century’s backward glance could provide.  Although Wagoner ranges across familial relationships, generational transition, nature, what was done and what left undone, collectively, the poems have an atmospheric stillness and balance.  They offer clear-eyed, unsentimental, but generous insights. The most striking poems are those about the difficulties of aging. Wagoner writes of finding that his body “…disobeyed / its own commands to its own purpose,” and his tone in these poems blends regret, disbelief, levity, and transformation. In “Listening,” Wagoner considers hearing loss:  “…vibrant / with the white noise and the equally beautiful / white silence of snow.” Most poems reveal a poet who, if not yet fully at home …
