After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches

In After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches, renowned poet W.D. Snodgrass offers his frank and evocative essays on his life as a student, lover, son, husband and poet. Divided into thirteen sections, he begins in his hometown of Beaver Falls, a milltown so clamorous that “walking the dog at night, you were horizoned by the distant clamor of mills and foundries. We never heard this though, unless there was a strike and it stopped.” This book concludes in a kind of double homecoming, with Snodgrass returning to his hometown for the 50th reunion of the Beaver Falls High School Class of '43, as well as to one of his first loves—music, a passion shared by his wife, Kathy. “If music has been a more constant mistress than a wife,” Snodgrass muses in the book's final portion, “it's still better to have a wife or mistress who constantly makes music.”