nature of many of the characters resists his
attempts to humanize them, and we don’t feel
the force of poetic revelation; a more sympa-
thetic Hitler and company might have created a
literary sensation. In Snodgrass’s bunker, the
most successful poems belong to the women.
The pantoum’s repetitions circle around Magda
Goebbels’s mind as she meditates on how to save
her children—‘‘Now Joseph’s sister’s offered us
the chance/To send the children somewhere
farther West/Into the path of the Americans/To
let them live. It might be for the best’’—several
days before she and her husband will hit on the
final family solution of poisoning them all. In
contrast, Eva Braun flounces about the bunker,
ecstatic at the new life she has defined for herself
and Hitler: ‘‘Today He ordered me to leave,/To
go back to the mountain. I refused./I have
refused to save my own life and He,/In public,
He kissed me on the mouth.’’
In the 1980s Snodgrass began a series of
collaborations with the painter DeLoss McGraw,
resulting in humorously sinister books with titles
likeThe Death of Cock RobinandW. D.’s Mid-
night Carnival.If Nazi history moved Snodgrass
toward the prosaic, McGraw’s paintings helped
him discover a new musicality, mixed with gro-
tesquely comic intimations of mortality, in a set of
nursery rhymes for adults.
...Snodgrass jumbles into this vaudeville
an open embrace of all his favorite traditions,
alluding more obviously than before to writers
ranging from the seventeenth-century cavalier
poets, to the troubadours (he has ably translated
Provenc ̧al poetry), to modern masters like Wal-
lace Stevens (‘‘They say, ‘Your songs do not
compute./ Your music’s mixed; your moral’s
moot’’) and W. H. Auden (‘‘In the perspective
of the heart/Those dearly loved, when they
depart,/Take so much of us when they go/That,
like no thing on earth, they grow/Larger...’’).
Working with McGraw relieved Snodgrass of
the overbearing obligation to seriousness with
whichThe Fuehrer Bunkersaddled him, and by
letting himself have more fun, he created more
interesting and important poetry. In their try-
anything, on-with-the-show, shuck-and-jive spi-
rit, Snodgrass’s McGraw poems owe something
to John Berryman, and while they do not possess
The Dream Songs’wild, manic power, they con-
stitute a significant accomplishment.
Not for Specialistsconcludes with forty new
poems, written over the past decade or so, which
provide many satisfying symmetries with the
early work. Snodgrass has always acknowledged
the comical nature of his name (‘‘poor ill-named
one,’’ sympathized Randall Jarrell): His early
‘‘These Trees Stand...,’’ which opens the
book, notes, ‘‘Your name’s absurd,’’ and turns
on a delightfully ludicrous refrain, ‘‘Snodgrass is
walking through the universe.’’ The recent poem
‘‘Who Steals My Good Name’’ returns to the
name blame game: It casts spells upon a Snod-
grass masquerader ‘‘who obtained my debit card
number and spent $11,000 in five days,’’ after
beginning with a complaint from ‘‘My pale step-
daughter’’: ‘‘Well, that’s the last time I say my
name’s/Snodgrass!’’ Even better, his homage to
Marvell, ‘‘Chasing Fireflies,’’ exploits his name’s
literal sense, since ‘‘to snod’’ means ‘‘to make
smooth, trim, or neat.’’
...TheHeart’s Needlesequence also earns
a reprise, in ‘‘For the Third Marriage of My First
Ex-Wife,’’ which speaks once more of the woes
of wedlocks past—
not once in twelve years had we laid
each other right. What wehadmade
were two nerve-wracked, unreconciled,
spoiled children parenting a child.
—in order to look benignly ahead and wish
everyone well. This moving gesture acknowl-
edges all the hearts badly in need of repair,
including that of the daughter, as well as provid-
ing some comic and benevolent surprises:
Our daughter, still recovering from
her own divorce, but who’s become
a father, in her call at least
as an Episcopalian priest,
will fly down there to officiate
in linking you to your third mate;
only some twenty years ago
that daughter married me also
to the last of my four wives.
‘‘Also, save the best for last,’’ the poem ends.
Not all the new poems that endNot for Special-
ists rank with Snodgrass’s best, but several
decidedly do. All told, they provide a delightful
and absorbing range of subjects and moods:
splenetic political poems denouncing the Bush
administration’s war in Iraq, satiric Ben Jonson-
like epigrams on a contemporary literary culture
designed (his book’s title implies) increasingly
forspecialists, wry observations on the foibles
of advancing age, and generous accounts of love
for wife, children, and friends. Through it all,
Snodgrass remains undiminished in his technicalHeart’s Needle