306
ROBERT BOYER S
MIXED BAG
AFTER EXPERIENCE. By W. D. Snodgrass. Harper
&
Row. $4.50.
FIRSTBORN. By Louise Gluck. New American library. $4.00.
THE BACK COUNTRY. By Gary Snyder. New Directions. $4.00.
THE RIBS OF DEATH. By Paul Zimmer. October House. $4.95.
The title of W. D. Snodgrass' new volume, his first in eight
years, would seem to point to a cooling of those intensely personal con·
cerns he developed with such great care and skill in the earlier
Heart's
Needle.
In fact, and here one does not know whether or not to include
"alas," the concerns remain, as urgent as ever; the voice persists, no less
whimsical and pathetic than it was; the landscape has not improved.
The poems in
After Experience
are different, though, more depressing,
if that seems possible. The poet's experience has structured perception
in such a way that what once in the poems seemed peculiar to Snod–
grass, if nonetheless mundane and familiar, no longer seems merely
a personal problem at all. Snodgrass' more recent poems reverberate
with irony and dismay at the downward drift of an entire culture, and
we attend as much to patterns of hopelessness and betrayal as we once
did to the particularities of obstructed intimacy.
Of course, it is not the context in which Snodgrass thinks and feels
that concerns us very much, but the degree to which he can artfully em–
body his concerns in language that makes them somehow meaningful
for us. Largely he has succeeded, in spite of the grave risks he has in–
curred in the preparation of his new volume. A great many of the
poems he has collected here are dangerously close to being set pieces,
rather stagy, and so judiciously molded that they seem almost too nice,
too clean and transparent and predictable to be true. A poem like
"Leaving The Motel" is perfect in its way, perhaps on first acquaintance
even a little too perfect, inevitable
in
the particulars of its unfolding,
the rhymes so evenly modulated as in these times to call attention to
themselves.
Outside, the last kids holler
Near the pool: they'll stay the night.
Pick up the towels; fold your collar
Out of sight.
