Clemency (2002) by Robert Wrigley

“Robert Wrigley is an historian of the present. His smart, moving poems are attuned to the drama of the moment, and his honest, musical language lifts real experience deftly into art.”

—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate

This collection of poems by the award-winning author of In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Viking, 1995) offers an array of epiphanies: perceptions on and experiences with wildlife: wolf, owl, geese, deer, skunk . . . as we’ve not read before.

Robert Wrigley is Director Emeritus of the MFA program at the University of Idaho. He’s the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Reign of Snakes (Viking, 1999), What My Father Believed (University of Illinois Press, 1991), Moon in a Mason Jar (University of Illinois Press, 1986), The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979), and a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press, 2021). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, two NEA Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and he has served as Idaho’s State Writer-in-Residence.