For the Scribe

David Wojahn is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Poet's Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

In his formidable ninth collection, Wojahn ('World Tree') catalogues extinctions personal, cultural, and ecological. 'Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted/ One last survey,' he writes in the opening poem, an elegy for his father. As longtime readers might expect, Wojahn's own 'last survey' impresses with both its diversity and detail. Bristling with quotations and historical artifacts, his rhythmic lines capture bluesmen as well as they do woodpeckers. In the title poem, he writes 'inscription/ Is a form of weaving,' and indeed, his brocaded compositions often have the richness of tapestry. Whether examining Glenn Beck or laundry robots, his 'burnished effusions' relentlessly hone in on the specific. In a book so focused on death and violence, such specificity can grow exhausting, even ghoulish, as in one voyeuristic sequence about lynching. But at his best-in heartfelt laments for other poets, and unhinged fantasias that put Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Johnson, and Ronald Reagan in conversation-Wojahn moves and fascinates, drawing readerly attention to the 'auguries of apocalypse' all around, however "small in scale. 'God of stench & musk,' Wojahn writes in one gloriously open poem about Pan and Xanax, 'how well you know our recent century/ where art & terror have so freely & relentlessly conjoined.'