Author Description

from the Author's Note "When I put a book of new poems together I go through the poems to determine whether their direction is consistent. Those that are out of line are left behind. The poems collected in Snows Gone By were written over a thirty-eight-year period, from 1964-2002. The older poems have in common the fact that they were left out of earlier books. They were, I thought then, inconsistent with what was going on in my life or work in those periods. Collected here, I realize, the poems together probably give a better idea of my total work than any of my other books have--they present a life & work that has been what it's been, with little need for consistency." The François Villon ballad that provided the title to this book (from his "Greater Testament") is immediately preceded by lines that speak of the agonies of age & death. The ballad asks what has become of many famed & beautiful women already gone in Villon's time, & each stanza ends with the refrain, the answer to his question, asking where the snows of yesterday have gone. As Bill Brown once said, "I knew he was dead, but I had to keep telling him the story, I had to keep talking to him."