One risks concluding too little or too much about volumes of the "new and selected": the format can make a book seem little more than a conveniently packaged highlights reel or nothing less than a career-defining manifesto. David Wojahn’s graceful Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2004 fairly transcends this crux. While, in the elegant craftsmanship of individual poems and of the collection as a whole, the volume is so quintessentially Wojahnian one could almost say nothing more about it than that, it also makes a grand statement, offering a sweeping view of Wojahn’s evolved aesthetics. Wojahn’s capacious, mournful, neo-classical studies of political and personal crisis and of historical and private memory glow on their pedestals here. Rightfully presented as a culmination, Interrogation Palace allows Wojahn’s achievement to be seen as both the product of each of his six previous volumes and as a new revelation, the creation of this particular manifestation of these poems.
     Interrogation Palace makes a remarkably coherent poetic statement. The new poems, which open the volume, provide a robust, overture-like introduction that teaches us what to read for in what follows — that is, in the poems that have led Wojahn here. In this way the new poems also work as a kind of conclusion: they establish the themes and formal strategies the rest of the book (selections from Wojahn’s six previous collections in chronological order) will work towards. Admirers will not be surprised by Interrogation Palace’s investments and accomplishments: how the poems mobilize a formidable precision of image, density of allusion and elegance of association; how they assert poetry’s place as a serious method of difficult utterance, analysis, memory and even prayer; how they tease out both the cruel and the ameliorative potential of language and aesthetics; how they study familial and romantic relationships embedded in political realities and obsessively return to the connections between personal and public history. The book’s title neatly encapsulates this last, deeply Wojahnian mode: the phrase "interrogation palace" invokes the totalitarian fantasia of capital-H history as well as the specific Spanish building in the eponymous poem — where political informs personal trauma, and the language of police interrogation transfers to a marriage on the rocks ("everyone’s in custody & no one is prepared yet // to confess"). The phrase evokes our country’s current adventures in Iraq (as do several poems and the cover’s archeological fragment) as well as the process of a poet who unflinchingly analyzes personal history. ("Interrogation" fits Wojahn’s approach, which can feel like a latter-day "confessional" mode — Lowell after Vietnam and Reagan.) Wojahn returns again and again to a doubling of personal and political; it is an insistence that instructs.
     Never merely telling us about the subtle interplay between global history and personal trauma, Wojahn’s poetry more than anything enacts such intersections through meditative, image-based movements. Wojahn crystallizes this approach to what we might call the "historical lyric" in 1994’s Late Empire, where the title poem traces out the lacey connections between aristocratic ballooning ("tasseled and swollen, // a Fabergé egg"), modern rock concerts and nightmares of Dresden and nuclear annihilation ("the terrible / incinerating light has come"). Like that volume’s "Homage to Ryszard Kapuscinski," the new poem "Dithyramb and Lamentation" offers a powerfully restrained study of the aesthetics of domination in a series of "sonnets" unified not so much by the horrors of global violence as, more subtly, by the horrifying use of image and language in the service of domination. Wojahn’s practiced touch here does not exactly fall under the category of "form," but formal innovations play their role throughout the volume: his ambitious sequences usually based on exploded sonnets; in "Dithyramb and Lamentation" the pitch perfect terza rima of "George W. Bush in Hell"; his frequent use of near rhyme to supply sonic architecture; his eerie single-lined stanzas that, more successfully than anything so succinct should be able to, convey overloaded memory and traumatized disaffection. Wojahn also frequently works with a recognizable stanza form — usually consisting of three to six lines, alternating long and short, at play across indentations — first glimpsed in its full maturity in Late Empire. Such structures provide a compelling graphic representation of discursive progress and meditative rhythm. Ultimately all these shaping strategies seem not the formalist’s crafty display but a free-verser’s commitment to inventing the shape each poem needs.
     Not surprisingly, the disappointments are companions of Wojahn’s triumphs. The poetry is so fully designed, so saturated with authorial control, that the poems can seem closed off. While one hardly wants to read a poet who has abdicated control, our angles of vision are so fully determined by Wojahn’s camera work that a reader can feel more like a pliant audience member than a nice warm fellow interpreter of the world. Sometimes the poems talk to us as though we need to learn a lesson. In "The Resurrection of the Dead: Port Glasgow, 1950," Wojahn seems to accuse readers of insufficient enlightenment when he demands we face the wounds of a badly burned boy: "I want you to move closer. . . . / Stroke, if you can, his face. You — the risen, / The born again — how can you turn away?" This vaguely preachy attitude can sneak into otherwise powerful descriptions of, say, the near extinction of the whooping crane (in "Board Book & the Costume of a Whooping Crane": "numbers dwindled by DDT, by power line & coyote") or the gruesome complicity between music and totalitarianism (in "Theremin: Solo & Command Performance": "all inventions / will in time be used to rip the world asunder, // servant & soundtrack to Murder & State"). Wojahn’s tone rarely moves away from the chord he has mastered, one made of notes of regret, mournfulness, a certain critical disgust and sometimes a hint of satisfaction with the art’s revelations and order. The speaker of these poems can seem overly invested in himself as the hub through which all this public and personal history gets organized into art. In "Interrogation Palace" it becomes actually disconcerting that, in the age of Abu Ghraib, the poem finally uses the political as a figure for the personal without any counterbalance. The poems too often risk turning to the personal as the solution or baseline of meaning in their otherwise complex universe; presented with this pattern, the reader can tire of the predictability with which broad vistas get funneled back to (albeit compelling) portraits of father, mother, lover, child.
     Given all this, it is refreshing to encounter self-conscious variations, especially in the final sections’ offerings from Wojahn’s two most recent books, The Falling Hour (1997) and Spirit Cabinet (2002). In both "The Shades" and "Stammer" we find Wojahn working with a masterful but looser, less classical control of language ("A rifle in his mouth in a basement my father wordless" and "I am speaking now I have permission," respectively). The final poem, "Kill Born, Weed Smoke, Chk Mark, Onchola Senn," reminds us of Wojahn’s ability to question self-pity ("O poor self named me, etc.") and, in an encounter with desolate teenagers who repulse his approach, of his willingness to undermine self-mythology ("o not / my business anyway"). And any further complaints can be nearly erased by a poem as thoroughly stunning as the penultimate "Triclinium: Couple Bending to a Burning Photo."
     If Wojahnian elegance comes at a price, so does the collection’s striking coherence. It coheres in part because the terrific selections from Wojahn’s two most recent books account for well over a third of Interrogation Palace’s nearly two hundred pages; combined with the new poems, the most recent work here makes up more than half of the book. Conversely, Wojahn’s first two collections, Icehouse Lights (winner of the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected by Richard Hugo) and Glassworks (1987), receive the least attention in this collection, making up only about fifteen pages combined. One could complain about this: the books most available to, and presumably best remembered by, Wojahn’s readers crowd out the work that could most benefit from the curatorial approach of a "new and selected." But Wojahn’s mature style emerged in his third book, Mystery Train (1990), and the poetry before that does not neatly fit this volume’s grand statement. And so, like other prices paid, this one may also be worth it — if, in return, we get the precision of eye and evolution of craft that make very nearly every line here, and the volume as a whole, a lesson in the art of poetry. And we do.

— Christopher Matthews