After-Images - Autobiographical Sketches (Paperback, 1st ed)

In After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches, W.D. Snodgrass offers us his first collected autobiographical prose. A renowned poet and contemporary of Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman, Snodgrass takes us from his beginnings in a Pennsylvania milltown, his first loves, music lessons and marriages -- which provided the genesis of his early poems -- to his World War II Navy hitch, literary friendships, and personal battles. Finally, the book brings us back full circle, concluding with a sort of double homecoming: a visit by Snodgrass to his hometown, now in severe economic decline, and a rediscovery of his love of music.Iron and steel work surrounded our city, Beaver Falls; walking the dog at night, you were horizoned by the distant clang and clatter of mills and foundries. We never heard this, though, unless there was a strike and it stopped.