Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems
By (Author) W.D. Snodgrass
BOA Editions, Limited
BOA Editions, Limited
3rd April 2006
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Anthropology
810.8
Physical Properties
Paperback
251
Width 152mm, Height 228mm, Spine 20mm
382g
Description
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 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.
Author Bio
W. D. Snodgrass is author of over twenty books of poetry, two books of literary criticism, and six volumes of translation. Honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award, Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endownment for the Arts. He retired from teaching in 1994.
