Wrigley (Lives of the Animals
, 2003) has been offering up well-crafted, articulate and largely autobiographical free verse since the 1970s, often reflecting his Great Plains roots or his longtime residence among the woods of northern Idaho. This ample career-spanning selection shows how little the essence of his carefully wrought poems appears to have changed: the notion that "the body's one life, constant, expansive, simultaneous" informs all his observations and invocations, cast, often, into sinuously subordinated, easy-to-follow sentences. Wrigley's personality remains a granite constant even as his attention wanders—from the distant past to the near future, from his parents to cottonmouth snakes, from a confident mare in spring to a "Sad Moose": "Each day for a week I've watched him,/ the ribs defined into claws." Wrigley's quiet respect for nonhuman nature and his consistent interest in the meaning of sex, paternity and literary inheritance unify his detailed and trustworthy, if rarely pyrotechnic, work, in which "Living is a slow dance you know/ you're dreaming, but the chill at your neck/ is real." (Oct.)
