cover image For the Scribe

For the Scribe

David Wojahn. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $15.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8229-6454-4

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.” (Mar.)