Like “bits of song caught/in the spillway of a beaver dam,” D.R. Wagner’s words are magic. How else could a poet describe love with such clarity and precision, while so skillfully accentuating its ethereal nature? Who else would see “birds landing on the lakes” of his beloved’s eyes, horse-shaped wind leaping though her hair, a tiny bucolic scene living inside her hand? Who else would sense that the seasons know his beloved by name? The truth is that in Love Poems the seasons are the beloved because the beloved is the world. This is the most transcendent kind of magic. And, as Wagner shows us, the most transcendent magic does not create illusion but removes it. We see at last that the beloved, the world, and poetry are all one. How beautiful it is!                  
—Melissa Studdard, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast


D.R. Wagner’s Love Poems is an extraordinary collection. The poetic rhythms bind images of earth and heaven in an enraptured dancing within the lovers’ world, “the court of birds and angels” (“That Curl”). The poems are lyrical celebrations of love’s enchantment and tenderness, often conveyed through the music of the natural world. In this work Wagner gives expression to the experience of deep rapport, a profound sense of the “other,” with clarity and invention: “. . .angels / gathered at the edges of your mouth” (“There Was a Little Inn in the Valley”). These are love poems indeed – intimate, warm, magical.

― Ingrid Swanberg  - Editor Abraxas Magazine


 
Kenneth Patchen was the Holy Grail of love poems. The rest of us do the best we can. Most love poem books are confessional in nature, but D.R. has chosen another path. Like a marks-man he aims for the heart, only his arrows are words.  He possesses the skill to bring the reader directly into the moment. The possibilities of what can be, in a way that makes the reader feel the poet is speaking directly to him or her. He has the skill set to allow the work to fit into any situation, writing about the state of love, being in the moment, not the conventional “I” or “We.” In the process, he allows access to an emotional state of being that works at multi levels. Put on your slippers, pour yourself a glass of wine, curl up next to the fireplace and explore the many paths of love’s long winding road.
 
― A.D. Winans


In this new collection, D.R.Wagner is sui generis, one of a kind, willing to break from the poetry fashion of our time to remind us once more that love poems are an essential luxury. These are poems of the earth and starry skies, poems of treetops and horses, of ordinary and sometimes broken moments in extraordinary yet quiet lives—all intertwined to lay bare on the page the ever-mysterious phenomenon called love. Like Neruda’s legendary collection on the subject, D.R. Wagner’s “Love Poems” stands out in a prolific body of work. Wagner’s captivating language, original and sensual rhythms, and pure devotion to love on the page shine through in poem after poem. “Love Poems” charts a poetic map of the human heart, with Wagner its masterful cartographer.

 — Alice Anderson