David Wagoner, Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005), pbk, 160pp., $19.95.

     There’s a little Ted Kooser in David Wagoner. He’s a Midwesterner—though transplanted to Washington—who, working largely without major attention from prize-givers, has built an impressive body of low-key, accessible poetry, often about natural and everyday subjects.

     I won’t belabor the point further, especially as there are plenty of areas where they diverge, but I mention it because Ted Kooser is currently a good touchstone for the subset of poetry readers who already know they don’t like that style of work and thus probably won’t be well served by this review. For the rest of us, the question is whether the poet executes the style well. In the case of Wagoner’s newest book, Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005), my answer sadly must be that he still does it sometimes, but not in enough of the poems for me deliver an unqualified recommendation.

     Good Morning and Good Night contains eight sections, some tied around a loose theme, such as poems of childhood, poems about writing, and poems on crime. Other sections do not have as immediately obvious a theme, though many of the poems in them cover relationships or the lack thereof, trees—which appear in various guises in the titles of at least a half-dozen poems—animals, and quotidian life moments.

     To the book’s great disadvantage, the first two sections are easily the weakest. Section one contains the aforementioned poems on childhood. Wagoner attempts what I believe is supposed to be a childlike voice, but his version is duller than any child I know. The language is almost universally flat, vague, and devoid of metaphor, three things that few real children are, however difficult their speech may be for adults to understand.

     In a poem called “Evening Song on Our Street,” the narrator witnesses an impromptu infirmary. Wagoner tells the reader, “The people were black and had eaten the wrong supper / While celebrating something, a man told us.” Setting aside the awkward construction—did the man in fact tell them the people were black?—this language is terribly slack. What were they celebrating? What caused the food poisoning? Who is the man? Did he say what they were celebrating and the narrator forgot, or did he actually say “something”? These are important questions whose answers could assist the poem, but Wagoner never answers them. Instead, the blacks sing, and we get this ending: “my mother and father held me / By both my hands again, and we walked home.” Even in context, it’s as listless as it sounds.

     Section two is comprised of poems about writing. Here I must disclose a strong distrust for the entire genre of “Poetry Poems” and so admit that I think my dislike of this section of the book is far more subjective than my dislike of the first—as the writing here is definitely better, with actual metaphors. However, when a poem titled “For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop” begins, “I’ve watched his eyelids sag, spring open / Vaguely and gradually go sliding,” and it’s the second consecutive poem to use the word “vaguely,” my own eyes roll to the ceiling.

     Wagoner frequently employs a visual stair-step in his poems, indenting the second line slightly, the third slightly more, and returning the fourth line to the left margin. While such structures, if overused, may seem like an arbitrary tic, Wagoner more often than not makes the format fit the theme of the poem or the wording of the lines in a variety of pleasing manners. One example is this passage from “Bad Chairs,” which also demonstrates his facility with free-verse line breaks: 

Never to swivel, never to bend over
       Backwards, but to stand up
             For yourself on your own four legs.

     Wagoner’s figurative language, like most aspects of his poetry, is understated. Sometimes the approach works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it does both in the same poem, as with “In a Storm.” Wagoner describes hail as “like the ghosts of salmon eggs,” which is strong both as an intriguing juxtaposition and as an addition to the overall theme. On the other hand, he mentions “stumps as gray as driftwood,” a pedestrian comparison indeed.

       Several of the stronger poems appear later in the book under a biblical umbrella, with “Burnt Offering” providing a glimpse of Abraham and Isaac as seen by the goat, and “The Son of a Carpenter” giving the reader possibly the most creepily effective image in the entire book, of Jesus resting “at the end of days against a tree” after the hard work of “driving the nails home.”

       Perhaps the overriding feeling of Good Morning and Good Night is one of aloneness, if not outright loneliness. Fortunately, Wagoner is adept at conveying the feeling, whether in poems featuring a first-person narrator by himself, third-person peeks at solitary individuals, or accounts of people with other people but nevertheless alone. “At the Foot of a Mountain,” the final poem in the book, speaks in the second person of climbing a mountain accompanied only by the ghosts of “old guides.” The poem concludes, “You can see them moving / On all sides of you and beginning, / As you join in, their uninterrupted chanting.”

      Good Morning and Good Night is unlikely to overcome anyone’s prejudices: those who like David Wagoner’s poems will overlook the flaws, and those who dislike his work or accessible poetry generally won’t be convinced by the strengths of the book. Its effect on a somewhat disinterested observer between the two poles, as I am, is similar: plenty of qualities to enjoy, but not enough to call it more than a decent book of poems. Sadly, the single word I would pick to describe it is “innocuous.”

— Steven D. Schroeder