Pale soul, consumed by fear
of the living world you haunt,
have you learned what habits lead you
to hunt what you don't want;
learned who does not need you;
learned you are no one here? ( )

First published in 1960, W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle is one of the finest single-volume collections of poetry I have ever read, a work of sustained verbal and conceptual intensity and remarkable consistency of vision and execution. The structure of the book is loosely narrative, tracing as it does the dissolution of a marriage and the resultant aftermath -- the title poem, which comprises the second half of the volume, is famously addressed in absentia to the poet's young daughter. The voice is by turns astringent, rueful, and defiant, and the prosody consists largely of vigorous yet flexible quatrains, a strong, classical driving line. The poems are full of sadness, but staunchly bereft of self-pity; they achieve a stinging emotional pitch while remaining fundamentally grave and austere. Taken as a whole, they are an achingly perfect expression of a certain kind of middle-aged American Protestant male poetic sensibility -- yearning, loss-haunted, full of inchoate nostalgia -- that I find deeply affecting. ( )

A wonderful first book, but more to the point, a wonderful book -- PERIOD. I wish I'd kept the copy I bought when it first appeared fifty-three years ago. I only wish that the hash-smoking ex-friend who had it got some good out of it. Meanwhile, the poems are quiet but intense, literate, and memorable these many years later. Curiously, I found that the sequence of pieces which give their name to the collection as whole made far less impression on me than individual pieces like "April inventory". Incidentally, those who know Snodgrass from his latter-day neo-Beatnik free/trippy stuff will be surprised to find that his earlier work might well have placed him in the ranks of the so-called "New Formalists" like Mark Jarman and Mariyln Hacker ( )