W.D. Snodgrass – författare

In his first collection of essays on poetry in 27 years, W.D. Snodgrass goes after that seminal quality, the poet’s individual voice, that separates the best poetry from the merely technical and pedantic. Beginning with an essay on the poetic impulse, and continuing through prosody and musicality, Snodgrass gives us an essential handbook for poets and poetry readers.

Responsible for the emergence of American confessional poetry, W.D. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his first book, Heart’s Needle. He lives with his wife, critic and translator Kathleen Snodgrass, in Erieville, New York, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

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.