AFTER EXPERIENCE

This is only the second published book of poetry by a college English teacher...but the first won a Pulitzer prize in 1960. The prize-winning qualities are also obvious in this distinctive, highly professional, and fairly sizable second collection. Mr. Snodgrass has a remarkable feeling for language (including, in the translations of Rilke, Rimbaud, etc., for several languages other than English). He writes of his personal experiences with his children, marriages, loves, and life, with a disarming simplicity that skirts sentimentality and transmutes the ordinary into a mythic, magic, identifiable reality. Commonsense directness marks his images, thoughts, and unobtrusive, perfectly turned rhymes and lines; awareness lies behind the neat, poetically exact exterior. Most remarkable, as examples of sheer skill, are poems in which paintings by Van Gogh, Manet, others are translated into the visual imagery of language and emotion. His poetry is experience: a fusion of the impressions into a whole that can be seen, touched, and felt.