Poetry, Nonfiction

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.”

FormatPaperback, Hardcover

Publication DateJanuary 1, 1999

ISBN9781880238769

From $12.00

About the Author

The author of nineteen collections of poetry, W.D. Snodgrass’ first collection of poems, Hearts Needle received the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Often credited with being one of the founding members of the “confessional” school of poetry, he dismissed the term and never regarded his work as such. Snodgrass published five collections of poetry with BOA Editions: The Fuehrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977), revised edition titled The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle: Poems (1995); Each in His Season (1993): Selected Translations (1998): After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (1999); and Not For Specialists (2006). Snodgrass died in 2009.