Snodgrass' 2002 brochure photo
Cover photo for Snodgrass' brochure for a 2002 literary festival held by Old Dominion University
Cover photo for Snodgrass' brochure for a 2002 literary festival held by Old Dominion University
Snodgrass sees his relationship to his daughter as both more enduring and more changing, more particular in its phases. And he recognizes that part of his role as a father is to tolerate the increasing separations from her that cause him a poignant sense of isolation.
Snodgrass's particularly American confessionalism--his lack of reticence in appropriating his own life and family for poetry--also distinguishes his early work from Larkin's. Not for Specialists includes six poems from his 1970 chapbook Remains, a bitter expose of unhappy family life centering on the early death of a hopelessly mousy wallflower sister, a sequence apparently so personal that he first issued it under the anagrammatic pseudonym S. S. Gardons: