THE STATE OF POETRY
505
we would have expected, ten years ago, from Heaney, but it is what
might have been hoped for.
JOHN DREXEL
SELECTED POEMS, 1957-1987.
By
W. D. Snodgrass. Soho Press.
$19.95.
W. D. Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for
Heart's Needle
in 1960. Perhaps, in the memorable language of Richard Nixon, he
peaked too soon. When he brought out his second collection,
After
Experience
(1968), although it was a better book, it was overlooked.
The Fuhrer Bunker
of 1977 was denounced by desperate misreading.
Recently it has become commonplace, in summary accounts of con–
temporary verse, to blame Snodgrass for the abuses of confessional
poetry. Thus are the sins of the third generation visited upon the
progenitors . One must admit that
Heart's Needle,
with its miseries of
divorce and child-loss, started things: Robert Lowell sometimes
credited his Iowa pupil Snodgrass with showing him the way to
Life
Studies.
Perhaps Snodgrass's
Selected Poems
1957-1987,
beautifully pro–
duced by Soho Press, will find this paleoconservative new readers
among the young, as new poets look to rhyme and meter again.
Snodgrass is a master of poetic forms. His meters are flabbergasting
and multiple, counting whatever can be counted. Within these me–
ters, and without them when he tries a poem free of number, his
rhythms are resolute and expressive. He begins with the noise of the
fifties , "Stone lips to the unspoken cave," but continues to explore the
thousand things available to formal genius, like this stanza that ends
"Lobsters in the Window":
I should wave back, I guess.
But still in his permanent clench
He's fallen back with the mass
Heaped in their common trench
Who stir, but do not look out
Through the rainstreaming glass,
Hear what the newsboys shout,
Or see the raincoats pass .
