When Nothing Wild Remains

Description

Poet Gerald Wagoner revisits his native American Northwest in this new collection.

“We come here to ask what is intact.” From his vantage now in Brooklyn, Gerald Wagoner looks out across miles and years to the northwestern states where he spent his early years, recalling “That look / I grew up with. A certain tribe / of chiseled face white people who stuck it out, / digging, planting, cutting, tending the pioneer story.” In the 130 years since historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed, Americans have struggled to come to terms with the changing realities of a national identity forged in openness and wild places, places like those where Wagoner grew up. “Nothing here that’s not America,” he writes; but increasingly these are places where towns like Twodot, Montana no longer exist except in memory and imagination. In his closing title poem he wonders “what will happen / to our places of renewal after the rich buy / all the mountains and nothing wild remains.” This is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but rather an effort at a necessary reckoning, both personal and national.

Poetry.

“Gerald Wagoner is a poet of uncanny particulars: ‘The child, as man, remembers the tang and texture of warm / summer apricots picked from / a tree that was never there.’ The poems in WHEN NOTHING WILD REMAINS are ‘on speaking terms with the wind,’ rich in imagery of a rural America he knows intimately. With him, readers revisit the ranches, back roads, reservations, and fishing holes of his Pacific northwest childhood, alive in the color, depth and intensity of ‘green days of night colder than never known’ and ‘bars packed with longhaired women who / cast daredevil lures in their wanton wakes.’ Wagoner’s graphic poetry is cinematic and sobering in its frank depictions of what’s missing, the wildness of a remembered past as seen in the light of an ongoing present.”
—Elaine Sexton

“In Gerald Wagoner’s powerful new book he recalls the disquiet and desperation of rundown towns and troubled lives in the American Northwest of his youth—Montana and eastern Oregon. Somewhat in the style of his old mentor, Richard Hugo, he writes tight, compressed, imagistic lyrics, expertly controlled in rhythm and idiom, and the tone is often somber in its examination of these downtrodden places with bars and cafes full of the terminally disappointed. Wagoner conjures broken commitments and tenuous connections, remembering it as he can from an adult vantage, coming back to it, sometimes physically, sometimes in memory, for the triage and rescue missions that art can provide.”
—Neil Shepard, author of How It Is: Selected Poems

“Gerald Wagoner brings his talents as a visual artist and sculptor to the poetic enterprise, crafting lines that satisfy the ear and eye as they take form (and place) against the white page. Memory, like art, yields its own truths, and there are many to be found in the negative spaces Wagoner negotiates.”
—Hilary Sideris, author of Liberty Laundry

Author Bio