Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

By W.D. Snodgrass

Book Overview

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 Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart's Needle, along with poetry from seven 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, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1929918771
• ISBN13: 9781929918775
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: BOA Editions
• Length: 251 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Perfect Introduction to a Unique Poet

For those unfamiliar with the poetry of W.D Snodgrass this significant volume will hold a bright candle to his genius. These poems are not only new works, but also poems selected from his fifty-year career of writing. His poems are at times creations of verbal and visual beauty while at other times they pick away at the other end of the spectrum of terror. He can be both hilarious and reflective, gentle and incisive, but he never leaves the reader without striking a chord of recognition. Yes, this is 'confessional poetry', but it strolls across the battlefields of Iraq, the petty crimes of our neighborhoods, and the dark sides of marriage and divorce with a tingling verve of style. One of the beauties of this particular collection begins on the cover with a reproduction of a painting by American painter DeLoss McGraw. Snodgrass and McGraw have collaborated for some twenty tears in a body of works that successfully incorporate Snodgrass' words with McGraw's inimitable 'illustrative characters', paintings in watercolor and gouache that retain the innocence of childlike renderings of people and places and animals that underline the pungent messages of Snodgrass' poetry. This is a beautifully produced book and by far the finest composite collections of his gifts yet published. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, May 06