When David Wagoner's last collection, Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems, was published, Harold Bloom noted that Wagoner's "study of American nostalgias is as eloquent and moving as that of James Wright, and like Wright's poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse." The same could be said of Walt Whitman Bathing, in which Wagoner's poems range from the lyric to the satiric, the elegiac to the transcendental, the autobiographical to the visionary. Other comments on Wagoner's earlier works: "Wagoner has the visual acuity of his loved hawks and a lifelong absorption with living and growing things. A lovely wit and a lively intelligence inform these poems." -- Maxine Kumin"When Wagoner looks at something, he brings it to vivid and immediate life through an extraordinary power with a simple name: love. He is as formally various as Thomas Hardy, as playful as Dickinson, as wry as Frost." -- Dave Smith"A sharp-eyed, even gutsy nature poet, the deftest and tenderest of love poets, Wagoner is a verbal magician capable of surprising, sometimes crazy tours de force."-- X. J. Kennedy
