A Tuesday evening, after dinner, it would have been light yet on the Palouse, maybe even quite warm. I was one of roughly a dozen students in Wrigley's poetry workshop that term, which was held, incongruously enough, in a classroom most often used by the campus ROTC, such that the walls were decorated with glossy posters of bombers and soldiers and wind-whipped American flags.

I, of course, was terrified of Wrigley. He isn't a big man, but from that very first class I was struck by the outsized dimensions of his presence. Wrigley's voice, for one, resonates and rumbles and fairly fills a room. His every movement—leaning back in his chair, cracking the spine of a thin volume, looking from one to the other of us with that weary, knowing gaze—felt measured and sure. And as you take in the man, as I did, nervously, with great trepidation, you can't help but take in the astonishment of his poems: the sharp, visionary lyrics of Lives of the Animals; the god-haunted meditations of Reign of Snakes; the wise, wondering narratives of What My Father Believed. I was there because Robert Wrigley had—it seemed so mysterious to me then, and, frankly, still does—written all those many indelible poems. I, too, wanted to write such poems.

I studied with Wrigley (or Bob, as he insisted) for three years, and in the years since—especially those first years after my MFA, as I struggled to find my footing as a writer—I have often looked back through my notebooks from classes and workshops, picked up the books of poems we read to parse again the many marginal scrawls, often my quick transcribing of something important Bob had to say about a turn, word, a shift in syntax. And I have wished I listened more carefully, wished I could somehow hear again, and maybe understand for the first time, all that Bob had to say about poems and the making of poems and what it might mean to be a poet, a maker, someone trying to fit language to the world.

Which brings me to Nemerov's Door, Robert Wrigley's recently published book of essays, essays that, mostly, have to do with just that: poetry and the making of poems.

Truly, entering these pages I felt very much like I was back in one of Bob's classes, and it was such a lovely, sustaining, illuminating place to be. Here again was that resonant voice; here that striking eye for craft and language. There are essays here that explicate (and I use that term as I think Bob might, to connote not the shaking down of a poem in pursuit of meaning, but the slow, mindful unfolding of a poem's making) work by Edward Arlington Robinson, Sylvia Plath, James Dickey, and Etheridge Knight, among others, and each explication is a treasure of attention, insight, and care; for instance, consider this from Wrigley's reckoning with a poem by his own teacher, Richard Hugo:

The last two lines are remembrance: imagine the young Richard Hugo, wading the streams of his native western Washington, and seeing the fish—the way he has made clear that one does see trout; it's always surprising—and this one's huge, a returning to spawn bull steelhead, probably as long as the speaker's leg. What does he do? He screams, and the trout vanishes, “snaking into oblivions of cress.” Even the fact that Hugo chooses to make oblivion plural—oblivions!—is part of his musical strategy. That ess ties the idea of oblivion to cress, to cries, and to sent and snaking. Above all there's “oblivion,” coming from the Latin, and meaning simply a state of forgottenness. There's something going on here, some deeper complexity emerging. Indeed, the trout may well be perfectly suited to its world in a way no human being ever is to his or her own; on the other hand, this human construction, this poem, is itself a trout; certainly it is called “Trout”—and if there is any justice, the human, the poet, might just avoid the oblivion that the trout, in its perfection, can both never escape and has no need to fear.

The writer David Foster Wallace coined the phrase “total noise” to describe the cacophonous, unceasing barrage of image and sound and novelty vying minute by minute for our attention. What luck, then, for someone—someone learned and sage, someone with a deep, resonant voice—to say, Look here. Look closer. This matters. Edward Arlington Robinson? Howard Nemerov? These are poets I hadn't read in years, or had never read, though now I have, and will, and since finishing Nemerov's Door, I've been turning to other poets and writers—A. R. Ammons, Deirdre McNamer—whose work I'd somehow missed or gone through too quickly. This, I think, is the first gift of Nemerov's Door—this call to care, to attention.

And the second gift has to do with the fact that Nemerov's Door is “mostly” a book about poems and the making of poems; it's also the story of a life lived in thrall to the rivers and forests of the Rockies, of a father and husband and teacher trying to make his way. It's the story of a boy from Illinois, a WWII veteran's son who applies for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, who uses his GI benefits to go to college (the first in his extended family to do so) where he studies, of all things, writing. It is the story of a young man visiting his father over the holidays, and his father—a tinkerer and carpenter and car salesman, a man who does not, exactly, understand poems but knows his son likes poems—drives him right up to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Howard Nemerov's door. “All that's between you and Nemerov,” Wrigley writes:

is poetry. All that's between Nemerov and your father is the good war, and maybe airplanes. Nemerov came from wealth and privilege; your father from abject poverty. Nemerov graduated from Harvard; your father did not quite finish the fifth grade in a degraded former coal-mining town. Did you mean to be like Nemerov? Only insofar as you meant to be a poet. Did you mean to be like your father? You're not sure you can say how it is you're like him even now. The kinds of things you notice or remember? That you make things? That you fix things? Poems, mostly. […] How in the world have you come to believe so much in words?

So, yes, poems. But, too, fathers and sons, class and inheritance, arrowheads and clocks and stars—the fitful, ongoing making of a self, a life. Nemerov's Door is as generous and wise a book as I've read in a long, long time.

Robert Wrigley has published 12 books of poems, including In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, in 1996); Reign of Snakes (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, in 2000); and Lives of the Animals (winner of The Poets’ Prize, in 2004); and Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award, in 2013). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry, among some 200 other magazines and journals; seven times in the Pushcart Prize Anthology; and five times in Best American Poetry. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho. He lives in the woods near Moscow, Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.