Publisher's Synopsis
Until the late 1970s, W.D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man-a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience.Not for Specialistsincludes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection,Heart's Needle, along with poetry from five other distinguished collections.
from "Nocturnes"
Seen from higher up, it makes its first move
in the low creekbed, the marshlands
down the valley, spreading across the open
hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops
still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over
lawns and gardens, past the house and up
the wooded hillside back behind us
till only some few rays still scythe
between the treetrunks from the far horizon
and are gone.
W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, includingThe Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle(BOA, 1995);Each in His Season(BOA, 1993); andHeart's Needle(1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books includeTo Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002),After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches(BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, includingSelected Translations(BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
