Four Brief Reviews of Robbins, Wagoner, Graham, and Strand

Hop on over to the Washington Post for these four mini-reviews of new collections from Michael Robbins, David Wagoner, Jorie Graham, and Mark Strand.

On Wagoner:

David Wagoner’s After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon; paperback, $16) is his 20th collection, and one of his best. The poems are remarkably consistent and polished, whether the subject matter is childhood memories, nature or aging and death. His lines and stanzas are crisp and sure, and the voice is always articulate and thoughtful, as in the opening of “By a Pond”: “Its face, as calm as the air,/ holds an inverted world/ of trees and a trembling sky,/ and I’m looking at a garden/ as far away from my eyes/ as if I lay underwater.” Wagoner knows how to describe a scene with such precision that readers feel both its immediacy and its larger import. Points of no return come throughout this rich, vital collection, which ends with poems that illustrate how to remember and how to die.

Read the rest after the jump.