As a recipient of Poetry's Levinson Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize and a nominee for the American Book Award and National Book Award, David Wagoner is one of this country's most celebrated poets.
 
In The House of Song, he offers a hundred new poems in six parts.  At turns elegiac, comic, and nostalgic, these poems venture to the seemingly infinitesimal points where people, legends, and culture collide with nature, memory, and action. 
 
With characteristic wit and brevity, Wagoner chronicles the material invasions of the natural world, reconsidering Thoreau amid ruminations on voyeurs and destroyers, slug watchers and moth collectors.
 
The House of Song asserts Wagoner's place among the finest of American poets, past and present.
 

Allen Guttmann, a professor of English at Amherst College, is the author of Women's Sports, Games and Empires, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports, and other books. He received the first President's Award for Sports Studies from the International Olympic Committee.