Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Continuum)

About this book

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 mana 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 Hearts 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 including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA 1995); Each in His Season (BOA 1993); and Hearts 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.