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     Philip Hoy’s conversation with W.D. Snodgrass is one of a series of interviews, conducted by the editorial board of Between The Lines, with “some of today’s most accomplished poets”. Each volume will contain a biographical preface, a bibliography (here compiled by Kathleen Snodgrass), and a selection of statements by – an interesting distinction – “critics and reviewers”. Subjects in preparation include Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur, suggesting a bias towards American poets roughly contemporary with the other editors, Ian Hamilton and Peter Dale. Kathleen Snodgrass, by the way, records Peter Dale’s review of After Experience (1968) but manages to forget Ian Hamilton’s – amongst the first to detect a falling-off from the poet’s first collection, Heart’s Needle. Noting the many prize-foundations to which Snodgrass was by then “indebted”, Hamilton found “precisely the tailored competence, the empty, stylish craftsmanship that one might gloomily anticipate from the endowed professional”.

     Philip Hoy’s credentials as Snodgrass commentator, indeed as disciplined exegete, were established by his 89-page contextual analysis (Agenda, Spring 1996) of a single poem from After Experience, ‘Van Gogh: “The Starry Night”’. Informed and enthusiastic, he takes the poet on a guided tour of his own career, prompting variations on the Paris Review interview of 1994. We hear again about the legendary Iowa creative writing class, Randall Jarrell’s brilliance (“Snodgrass, you’re writing the very best second-hand Lowell in the whole country!”); marriage collapse and psychotherapy, the search for “my own voice”, and Pulitzer success. Snodgrass is still preoccupied with prizes, especially those he didn’t win; and he attributes the defeat of one unlikely project – translations of epitaphs discovered in “an astonishing graveyard” in Romania, complete with accompanying photographs – to his failure to net the National Book Critics’ Award for Poetry with The Führer Bunker in 1977. Snodgrass had been nominated; but Robert Lowell inconveniently died the same year, taking the award with the posthumous collection Philip Hoy chooses to call Day for Day.

     Snodgrass complains he has been “out of favour with the literary establishment in recent years”, and sees detractors everywhere. There is surely a conspiracy; and Hoy, rather unwisely, takes the poet’s lead. Why (for instance) has Helen Vendler never mentioned Snodgrass? For his interviewer, this must be “either the result of rotten scholarship or else the result of something having nothing to do with scholarship”, some inexplicable personal hostility. Even compliments are suspect. Dana Gioia, who admired the ‘Fine Press Edition’ When Birds Build with Your Hair, described the poems as “contemporary pastorals”. Hoy comes to the poet’s defence, believing that the term “pastoral” suggests “that their apparent subjects – the birds’ nests, the orchard, the barn, and so on – were their real subjects as well, when in fact their real subjects were, manifestly, human concerns”. But this is the traditional material of pastoral – “the vehicle”, as Babette Deutsch puts it, “of a grave theme unrelated to the rural scene”. It is Hoy who is mistaken, and a prepared witticism (“It’s tempting to say that [Gioia] can’t see the mood for the trees”) falls flat. There is unintended comedy, however, when interviewer reminds poet that “‘Owls’ isn’t only apparently about a great horned owl and its mate and really about you and your wife – it’s about both”. The poet’s response is not recorded; but Hoy judiciously retreats (“let’s leave that issue on one side”) and finds the safer ground of prosody.

     The main focus of discussion is The Führer Bunker, once a modest 20-poem cycle. But Snodgrass has worked at it for over a quarter of a century, and at his last count there were 80. Dana Gioia called it a “macabre romp with Adolf and Eva”, but Snodgrass is convinced of its importance. Perversely enough, he told the Paris Review interviewer that its dramatic monologues are “my real confessional poems – an analysis of one’s own evil”. Adverse criticism of The Führer Bunker is for Snodgrass a mere misunderstanding, a failure to grasp its moral and political objectives. And these he hammers home to Philip Hoy, as insistently as the monologues themselves. But the poet is deceived. Relentlessly explicit, mechanically contrived, the poems leave nothing to the reader. “Well”, he ruminates, “who knows what they’ll be saying in 150 years?”