
A great unsung American poet. Snodgrass helped spark the “confessional” movement in American poetry as a student in Robert Lowell’s workshop. “Heart’s Needle” is a painful, beautiful sequence about his divorce and losing custody of his daughter. He was a master craftsman who left the most a poet can really ask for, a handful of unforgettable lyric poems that will last the ages—“The pear tree lets its petals drop / Like dandruff on a tabletop.” “Sorting out letters…I happened to find / Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold, / Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard / Who has turned up a severed hand.” ~ Reviewed by Dafydd Wood