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| Not for Specialists : New and Selected Poems
ISBN: 9781938160707
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / BOA Editions Ltd.
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;
Snodgrass made his splash with Heart's Needle (1959), a careful sequence of rhymed poems about his marital troubles and his daughter: the volume helped create so-called "confessional poetry" and won a Pulitzer Prize. Snodgrass gave his later allegiance not to autobiography, but to technique, pursuing, on the one hand, sad, clear, lyrical poems and rueful epigrams, and on the other, ambitious if not quixotic multipoem projects. Among the former, most of the best are brand new: they take on subjects as disparate as twilight fireflies, the war in Iraq, hip replacements and the man who stole Snodgrass's credit card, in styles indebted to poets as different as Andrew Marvell and A.R. Ammons. One Ammons-like work is "The Fuhrer Bunker," a cycle of poems about, and spoken by, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler and other members of Hitler's inner circle, completed in 1995. As if in reaction to that grim, ambitious achievement, other pieces here feature graceful measures and a light touch: a quartet of seasonal odes breathes new life into very old topics. This is a judicious selection from a significant oeuvre. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Poet W. D. Snodgrass was born on January 5, 1926. After serving as a Navy typist during World War II, he received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Iowa. With the publication of Heart's Needle (1959) a collection of confessional poetry that won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize, Snodgrass gained immediate fame as one of the best poets to come out of the 1950s. Snodgrass's later poetry is much less directly personal, as he learned to deal with some of the major historical events of his time. His wrote more than 30 books of poetry, criticism and translations including After Experience (1967) and The Fuehrer Bunker (1977). He taught at numerous colleges including Cornell University, Wayne State University and the University of Delaware. He died from lung cancer on January 13, 2009 at the age of 83. (Bowker Author Biography) |
