by W.D. Snodgrass
BOA Editions 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Come Around to the Beard
W.D. Snodgrass has a sense of humor about his surname; each of his three ex-wives were “more than pleased/to change it back,” he writes. And though it’s not nearly as iconic a name as Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, or Plath, a sufficient number of people still pay Snodsy (Sexton’s nickname) his dues as a pioneer of “confessional” poetry.
Snodgrass, who turns 80 this year, is a bit different from his then-contemporaries. While his early lyrics were essentially autobiographical, he never quite caved in to the self-indulgent despair that other so-called confessionals used both to their advantage and to their detriment. As decades have passed and the term “confessional” has grown uglier and uglier, Snodgrass has put forth a number of different efforts. Not for Specialists collects some of the best and worst of these efforts.
It goes without saying that the volume is worthwhile, at the very least, because it may introduce a new audience to his great long poem “Heart’s Needle.” His first book, which carried the same title, won him a Pulitzer Prize and national renown in 1959 ( years before Sexton’s and Plath’s first books); famously, he has not reached that kind of plateau since. But the poem, an astonishing and sympathetic look at his relationship with his daughter once he’s divorced her mother, is becoming more and more necessary to the canon:
If I loved you, they said, I’d leave
and find my own affairs.
Well, once again this April, we’ve
come around to the bears;punished and cared for, behind bars
the coons on bread and water
stretch thin black fingers after ours.
And you are still my daughter.
There is other work that is at least as good, if not better, than the poems comprising Heart’s Needle (from which a meager selection is offered in this book, including the poem responsible for the book’s title), though some of it’s just lyric meditation that goes belly up. He’s downright terrifying in his selections from The Fuehrer Bunker, a World War II series written from the first-person perspective of various prominent Nazis, among them Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Eva Braun, and Dr. Joseph Goebbels. In one of three typed “telegrams,” Himmler writes, “we have to recognize the risks demanded to found a utopia just think consider the vengeance for their theyre kin theyd wreak on us in no more than 20 years we must rush them out of Zossen or ‘disinfect’ them now.”
Snodgrass, like his former contemporaries, works best with heavy subject matter. Several weak poems in this volume are selected from Kinder Capers, poems which Snodgrass notes “were written for collaborations with the painter DeLoss McGraw.” Whether or not the poems appear out of context, they’re the type you’d like to call bad Frost imitations, but that are really just far-too-sentimental light verse about the changing seasons. The following section, selections from Each in His Season, falls into a similar trap; after a while, his rhyme schemes give out on him, becoming forced and predictable, and his sense of wisdom takes a smoke break.
Snodgrass resurrects himself in the final section, a collection of new poems. Some are a little tacky and light, not that Snodgrass would give a damn about that opinion. He addresses himself in “Critic”: “Since you’re unfashionable these days, you/Can quit worrying he might praise you.” Far more resonant, though, are poems such as the surprising “Talking Heads,” a meditation on America’s recent warmongering. He returns to World War II, discussing how “analysts” often ask how it is that “decent Germans” remained ignorant of the Holocaust:
None mentions just how many we let squirm
And twist at rope’s end for their predetermined,
Preemptive wars. But then, of course, they lost.
The point, as in The Fuehrer Bunker, is that, whether in marriage or war, no one person’s idea of Utopia can exist without sacrificing another person’s, and an acknowledgement of the importance of balance is perhaps the best we can do. But if Snodgrass deals best with heavy material, it’s also nice in the end to look at poems like “For the Third Marriage of My First Ex-Wife” to see how he has come full circle, meditating upon their “daughter, still recovering from/her own divorce.” In the end, the book is worthwhile as a look at an important poet, if for no other reason than to feel the eerie calm of a man too hard to let his verse succumb to melodrama.
*
