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Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

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 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 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
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 251
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781929918768
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 2006