Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 2006

Corrected, revised and expanded UK Edition

280 pp, ISBN: 978-1-904130-35-2, £10.99 (paperback only),  
Publication, April 30th 2009

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A note about Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems W. D. Snodgrass was one of the finest English-speaking poets of his generation, the generation that came to maturity in the aftermath of the Second World War. Not for Specialists draws on his Pulitzer Prize winning debut volume, Heart's Needle (1959), and on After Experience (1968), Remains (1970, 1985), Selected Poems, 1957-1987, The Fuehrer Bunker (1977, 1995), Kinder Capers (1986-2004), and Each in His Season (1993). It ends with some forty new poems equal in strength to the best of his previous work.

A note on W.D. Snodgrass W. D. Snodgrass was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1926. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and later took a BA, MA and MFA from the State University of Iowa. After graduating, he taught at various universities, among them Wayne State, Syracuse, and Delaware. His first book of poems, Heart’s Needle, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1960, and he received numerous awards and honors for his poetry, translations, and criticism. He died in his rural upstate New York home in January 2009.

Reviews of Not for Specialists   TLS, 26 February 2010 “[T]his volume – [Snodgrass's] first British publication in over thirty years – is both accidentally posthumous, and timely ... [Its] inclusiveness as a Selected cannot be faulted ... Poetry that depends on intense emotional experience of the autobiographical sort is somewhat at the mercy of the life. Not for Specialists, in over 250 pages of poetry, offers an invaluable overview of Snodgrass's career, and the reader can trace how he rose to the particular challenges that face a personal, lyric poet ...[A] ready and welcome gathering of [his] best work for the British reader. Poetry's first duty must be to help us want to live. If Snodgrass goes on being read, it will be because of what he has in plenty: uncommon tenderness." – Henry Shukman     Poetry Review, 99:4, Winter 2009 “This selection illustrates how [Snodgrass] repeatedly defended his approach to poetry, insisting "There is a loveliness exists, / Preserves us, not for specialists". – Tara Bargin   Able Muse: A Review of Poetry, Prose and Art, December 2009 “I admire [the poems'] undefended openness to 'the stuff [he's] made of of.' ... [W]itty, exuberant, moving, or terrifying ... imbued with a vulnerability that requires no small artistic fortitude to achieve. As he writes in 'Tumbling': 'Winning's not important, what's / Important is to show some guts.' There is no shortage of guts in Snodgrass." – Chris Childers http://www.ablemuse.com/v8/book-review/chris-childers/not-specialists-poems-snodgrass   The Guardian, May 2nd 2009 “... [A] poet of virtuosic skill, drawing on all the traditions of poetry, shaping them to his own ends ... [Snodgrass] is, at his best, a poet of casual grace and sly wisdom, always taking inventory of his emotional possessions, always grateful for what persists ... In poem after jewelled poem, he offered memorable language, odd glimpses of the eternal in the temporal. His terse formalities - he was a traditionalist of the best kind - lend his poems a sense of permanence. He did not have the range or grandeur of Lowell, the mad wit of John Berryman, the self-immolating genius of Sylvia Plath; but his poems will stay with us, persisting in their loveliness." – Jay Parini To read the whole of this review, please click on the link below: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/02/not-for-specialists-wd-snodgrass   New York Times “Snodgrass published an earlier selected poems nearly 20 years ago, but this fuller edition ... clarifies as never before the range of his accomplishment ... Snodgrass’s devotees must come away from Not for Specialists with deep gratitude ...” – Brad Leithauser   Booklist “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 ... One ... work is The Führer 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." Publishers Weekly "If you think that writing primarily in rhyme and meter bespeaks equanimity, or sweetness of character, read Snodgrass. Oh, he mellows out in the face of nature, but he's prickly. But if it weren't for whatever propelled him out of three marriages, he wouldn't have written his extraordinary record of noncustodial fatherhood, 'Heart's Needle,' the title piece in his Pulitzer Prize-winning first collection, which retains undiminished its ring of truth and its emotional power. By the same token, though at some temporal remove, he couldn't have written the new poem about his first wife's latest marriage, conducted by the beloved daughter of his early masterpiece, who has since become an Episcopal priest. His many profoundly bemused and persuasive poems of love's tougher moments, his marvelous angry and denunciatory poems, and the chilling Fuehrer Bunker poems in the voices of the major Nazis during the war's last month – all these might have been impossible if Snodgrass was a nice, easygoing guy. He's not that sort, and his best work seems permanent because he isn't." – Ray Olson

From Not for Specialists   Lobsters in the Window First, you think they are dead. Then you are almost sure One is beginning to stir. Out of the crushed ice, slow As the hands of a schoolroom clock, He lifts his one great claw And holds it over his head. Now, he is trying to walk – But like a rundown toy, Like the backward crabs we boys Splashed after in the creek, Trapped in jars or a net, And then took home to keep. Overgrown, retarded, weak, He is fumbling yet From the deep chill of his sleep As if, in a glacial thaw, Some ancient thing might wake Sore and cold and stiff Struggling to raise one claw Like a defiant fist; Yet wavering, as if Starting to swell and ache With that thick peg in the wrist. 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.       Farm Kids Our neighbor’s slim rag doll of a daughter (not, we’re told, of his own getting) breathed out: “You’ve got so many cookbooks!” – each eye a startled O as it skimmed our kitchen shelves – “And so much food!” Later, straight-faced, she said her mother lives now with her new boyfriend in another county. Hard up for farm jobs, her “Dad” has to drive 60 miles to the factory, getting up at 5 a.m. to leave them where his folks watch after them until he gets back home – sometimes 5 p.m. We go for long walks every evening. If we pass their trailer, they all tumble out shouting, “Snodgrass! Snodgrass!” The slim, straight-faced one is thought slow by her teachers. There’s much she’d do well not to know. The cool offspring of our city friends are driven to special schools, sports dates, parties, given phones, computers, cars, the insatiate stuff that will guarantee they can’t ever get enough. Our neighbors’ less keen hungers and kinder drives make sure they’ll make nothing of their lives but lives. ©