In The House of Song, celebrated poet David Wagoner 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. David Wagoner has edited Poetry Northwest for the University of Washington since 1966 and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In addition to many previous volumes of poetry, most recently Walt Whitman Bathing and Traveling Light, he has published ten novels, including The Escape Artist, which was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He has been honored with Poetry's Levinson Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize and was nominated for the American Book Award and National Book Award.