Clifton Snider - Career As A Poet and Critical Reception

Career As A Poet and Critical Reception

All of Snider's books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism have been critically acclaimed. His first chapbook, Jesse Comes Back (1976), was followed by the elegiac Bad Smoke Good Body (1980), written for the poet's older brother, Evan, who had disappeared under circumstances indicating foul play in October 1976. The loss of his older brother, who was gay, as is Snider, has run through Snider's work through the years, culminating in the frankly autobiographical novel, Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers (2001). Indeed, Snider uses each of the twelve poems from Bad Smoke as epigraphs for each of the twelve chapters of the novel.

Snider's criticism and poetry have been translated into Russian and French, and his poetry, fiction, and criticism have been published around the world in countries as diverse as Algeria, Canada, England, France, Ireland, and the United States. Much of his work concerns the foreign places he's visited, and though his home is Long Beach, California, the spiritual core of his poetry is often centered in New Mexico, with its rich mixture of Native, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures. In New Mexico he has held a number of residence grants at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Taos. (Other residence grants he has held have been at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Karolyi Foundation, Vence, France.) In addition to drawing on his own Christian roots for his work, Snider also draws on a multitude of other religious/spiritual traditions, from Native American to East Indian, African, and Nordic peoples, myths, and legends. Of particular interest are his poems about the paleolithic European caves of Niaux and Pech-Merle. Robert Peters examines Snider's work in a chapter titled "Poems for an Autobiography" in The Great American Poetry Bake-off (1987).

In 1986 at The Works Gallery, Long Beach, California, Out Theater produced as its premier production Edwin: A Performance Art Event, based on Snider's book, Edwin: A Character in Poems (1984), and his one-act play, A Little Get-Together.

Although, with the exception of Bad Smoke Good Body, Snider's early books focused on characters he invented, fellow Long Beach poet and critic Gerald Locklin maintains in Western American Literature that Snider's fifth book of poems, Blood & Bones (1988), "completes, with the dropping of the 'Jesse' and 'Edwin' personae, transition from modern to postmodern artist. The confidence he now exhibits renders accessible to artistic use a rich though often painful personal history." Of the same book, Richard Labonte writes in the national gay and lesbian magazine, The Advocate: "Southern California poet Clifton Snider explores the unexpected, the near tragic, and the adventurous. In three sections, he writes of a trip through Europe in the '70s, of his sudden hospitalization with a bleeding ulcer, and of his return to travel in Europe in the mid '80s. Poems of the first trip are soaked with the blood oozing into his guts; poems of the second trip reflect good health, a good eye, and maturity. The contrast is appealing; the poems, beguiling."

Impervious to Piranhas (1989), the chapbook that followed Blood & Bones, collects poems, early and late, which Snider had not found places for in his earlier collections. The Age of the Mother (1992), the full-length book that Snider published next, was praised by Glenn Bach ("In these beautifully spare words, Snider weaves personal mantras of birth, death, and transcendence. He announces the return of the Goddess after centuries of patriarchal dominance," Small Press Review) and Marilyn Johnson ("Out of . . . profound insight and spiritual wisdom he . . . has created an offering, a magnificent poetic vision, a prayer-book for the coming New Age," Pearl).

His collection of poems, The Alchemy of Opposites (2000), has received the greatest praise of Snider's fairly lengthy career. Eva von Kesselhausen, for example, writes in the Small Press Review: "Clifton Snider has been writing and publishing for over 25 years to establish himself as one of American's best . . . contemporary poets. The Alchemy of Opposites . . . stands as his most outstanding book to date . . . poignant poetry which is highly crafted and easy to read." And in the International Gay and Lesbian Review, Arnold T. Schwab declares, "The Alchemy of Opposites is Clifton Snider's . . . best work in verse, his most personal and moving"; Schwab also admires "Snider's emotional directness and the admirable accessibility of his imagery. . . . The Alchemy of Opposites indeed contains outcroppings of pure gold." Two poems from this collection, "Le Mont Saint- Michel" and "Honey from Heaven," won "In the Spotlight" awards from the online magazine, The Poetry Page, in 1999.

Snider published his collection of poems, Aspens in the Wind, in 2009. His much-anticipated career retrospective, covering his 40 years of publishing history, Moonman: New and Selected Poems, came out from World Parade Books in the spring of 2012. In the national online journal, Lambda Literary, Tony Leuzzi writes, "Moonman traces Snider’s fluid movement from one idiom to another: restrained poems in traditional forms; intellectual utterances that demonstrate his awareness of Western and Eastern philosophical systems; chatty, casual poems that respond to aspects of popular culture; and, most impressively, concise and memorable imagist verse. . . . the persona functions as an effective objective correlative whose dual obsessions with thought and body echo a whole generation of gay men. . . . are lit with a delirious, visionary glow."