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