Reading David Wojahn's superb selected poems, one has two seemingly contrary feelings. First comes the sheer pleasure of surveying Wojahn's range. Here's a poet who can write as convincingly of a backstage interview with Bob Marley as he can of Aeneas's reunion with Anchises in Hades. Wojahn has a fiction writer's talent for building panoramas. But such novelistic pleasure might belie the uneasiness one has reading this work and seeing the grief that runs beneath it. The bare biographical facts behind these poems include the nearly suicidal depression of the poet's father, the son's own depression, and the addictions and early death of his first wife, the poet Lynda Hull. The poems don't stop there. Wojahn is one of the few American poets since Lowell who has believably joined private and public life: individual suffering appears in the poems within the context of history. At times this perspective seems to enrich individual experience by giving it greater dimension; elsewhere it appears to trap the individual within a nightmare. In "Interrogation Palace" Wojahn picked the perfect title: these are poems of both largesse and terror.

Like Ellen Bryant Voigt, whom he resembles in few other ways, Wojahn has developed from book to book, and found formal strategies to give his obsessions and ambitions their full presence. His early poems, most in a granular free verse, show the influence of Philip Levine, James Wright, and Richard Hugo, who chose Wojahn's first collection for the Yale Younger Poets series. These poems are accomplished and often poignant, especially in the treatment of family and relationships. But Wojahn comes into his own with his third book, Mystery Train (1990). The title poem is a sonnet series about the history of rock and roll, as it parallels and contrasts the larger history of the time. One suspects that it's Wojahn's excitement about that subject itself which gives his voice a new immediacy and bite. The full intelligence of the poet—allusive, dense, playful, often darkly deadpan—galvanizes these lines.

Wojahn also begins to write in and against traditional forms, which he tests for their acoustic properties the way a guitarist might push his amp to the point at which a little, but not too much, distortion leaks out. Wojahn's weakness shows when this electrified verse movement takes over, when his dirge-like procession replaces the movement of the mind itself, and the lines fall into a lockstep, mechanical fatalism in the manner of Frederick Seidel, whom Wojahn overrates in his criticism. But on the whole, his technical mastery gives his work its depth and intensity. From The Falling Hour (1997) through to the new poems in this selection, he writes with as much formal and emotional strength as any poet alive. Consider, for example, the opening of his sonnet, "Fort Snelling National Cemetery, St. Paul, MN":

Thirty thousand dead, the markers all identical,
and with a map I find his stone,
                                                 find my own name chiseled

here between the monoliths of airport runway lights
and "the world's largest shopping mall," its parking lot

nudging the cemetery fence. The spirit in its tunnel
does not soar, the spirit raised by wolves.

It's humbling to see what Wojahn can do in seven lines. Look at the cunning slant rhymes, the small modulations in tone (for instance from "monolith" to "shopping mall"), the balance between the images of personal loss and the insinuations about national decay. All these lead to the big curve in the structure, from the literal scene to the territory of fable and myth.

As in these lines, so in the larger work: Wojahn's formal skills give the movement between the everyday and the mythic its believability. Such range and scope lend distinction to this entire collection. I wish the anthologists and the prize committees would start paying attention. But in the meantime, who cares? We have this powerful, panoramic book.

— Peter Campion