WD Snodgrass died in January this year, in his early 80s. He was among that subspecies known loosely as the confessional poets, mainly because Heart's Needle (1959), his Pulitzer prize-winning first volume, was deeply personal. The title poem, written in fluent, tightly rhymed stanzas, told a story about Snodgrass himself and his young daughter, whom he would "lose" through a divorce. Many of these stanzas, with their furled ferocity, stay in the memory like chunks of glittery ice broken from a northern landmass, floating in the silent space that surrounds a good poem:

The window's turning white.The world moves like a diseased heart packed with ice and snow.Three months now we have been apartless than a mile. I cannot fight or let you go.

Robert Lowell admired Snodgrass and helped him get a foot on the ladder of publication; Heart's Needle appeared in the same year as Lowell's Life Studies, which set the standard for confessional poetry. The poetry of Snodgrass was similarly autobiographical, explicitly so. It told of domestic problems, deep psychic pain. The poet wore his problems boldly, like a badge.

The anguish in Heart's Needle was amplified by the sense of discretion evident in every well-wrought phrase and easy, limpid rhyme. Here was a poet of virtuosic skill, drawing on all the traditions of poetry, shaping them to his own ends.

That volume, still the poet's best, included a line that provides this new collection with its alluring title: Not for Specialists. The work that contains it, "April Inventory", is a wry, somewhat elegiac poem that I memorised when I first read it, 40 years ago, and recite in my head more often than you would believe. The opening stanza sets the pace and tone:

The green catalpa tree has turnedAll white; the cherry blooms once more.In one whole year I haven't learnedA blessed thing they pay you for.The blossoms snow down in my hair;The trees and I will soon be bare.

There is a stateliness here, an elegance of expression combined with perfect ironic pitch. The casualness of his third and fourth lines strike the characteristic note: Snodgrass wryly addresses the fact that nobody really wants to pay him for learning the lessons of life or reflecting on their truths. He is not "a specialist", like a hand surgeon or an expert in Middle English syntax. He, Snodgrass, hasn't "read one book about / A book". He watches from the sidelines as his scholarly friends get promotions: "And one by one the solid scholars / Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars."

The poem veers toward light verse. But it's not "light" in any real sense. The speaker in the poem has obviously suffered setbacks, earned his stripes the hard way, and now he stands by his humanity, refusing even to object to the decay everywhere in evidence around him, within him: "There is a value underneath / The gold and silver in my teeth." The poem ends beautifully: "There is a loveliness exists, / Preserve us, not for specialists."

A whole career lives in this poem. Its restraint and wise glee illumine the rest of his poems to the end, as in "Invitation", the last poem in this largely chronological volume. Echoing the famous poem by Marlowe, it opens:

Come live with me and be my lastResource, location and resort,My workday's focus and steadfastDistraction to a weekend's sport.

With that deflationary enjambment ("my last / Resource"), Snodgrass subverts the original with subtle irony, displaying a whim of steel. There is no pretence to profundity, no bombast. He is, at his best, a poet of casual grace and sly wisdom, always taking inventory of his emotional possessions, always grateful for what persists. There is nevertheless a fairly wide range of moods and modes in Snodgrass, as anyone leafing through Not for Specialists will discover. At its uneasy centre lies a sequence from The Fuehrer Bunker, begun in the mid-70s and completed in the mid-90s. It's like the film Downfall in verse, with dramatic monologues by Hermann G枚ring, Eva Braun, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Albert Speer, Martin Bormann and, alas, Hitler himself. I say "alas" because all attempts to comprehend Hitler or get inside his perverted mind seem doomed. I have always found these poems strange, unbelievable, yet fascinating. That Snodgrass should have spent so much time on them puzzles and intrigues me. They seem to reach for profundity, and they fail.

Snodgrass didn't need to reach for profundity: its diamonds lay glittering all around him. In poem after jewelled poem, he offered memorable language, odd glimpses of the eternal in the temporal. His terse formalities - he was a traditionalist of the best kind - lend his poems a sense of permanence. He did not have the range or grandeur of Lowell, the mad wit of John Berryman, the self-immolating genius of Sylvia Plath; but his poems will stay with us, persisting in their loveliness.

Jay Parini's Why Poetry Matters is published by Yale