"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" begins by describing the woman in the title. In fact, the first stanza seems to offer a metaphorical "Snapshot[]" of her life. It incorporates sound as well as visual imagery, so it's not describing any kind of literal photograph—nor is the rest of the poem. Rather, the poem presents a series of brief vignettes or sketches over the course of 10 sections.
The "Daughter-in-Law" part of the title is only half true also. While the daughter-in-law is a recurring character, she doesn't appear in every section. And the poem illustrates the experience of various other women, too, from the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the poet Emily Dickinson to the daughter-in-law's daughter. The speaker, an apparent stand-in for Adrienne Rich, also finds indirect ways of commenting on her own experience.
In this opening section, the poet addresses the daughter-in-law directly. The first word is an abrupt, commanding "You" (emphasized by a caesura just after). It's as if the speaker means to startle the daughter-in-law with this blunt second-person address. (The poem that follows, in fact, will be a kind of feminist call to consciousness.) The speaker then describes what the daughter-in-law "once" was: a "belle," or attractive young woman, in the city of "Shreveport," Louisiana. The woman once had reddish-brown ("henna-colored") hair and "skin" as pink as a "peachbud." In other words, she seems to have fit a certain ideal of white Southern womanhood, as in the old archetype of the "Southern belle."
She seems nostalgic for her bygone youth, since she "still" wears dresses "copied from that time." That is, she still has her clothes made from the same old patterns, as if desperately trying to preserve her youthful glamour. She even plays a 19th-century piano piece drenched in nostalgia: Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 7, Andantino, A Major. As the speaker notes, the 20th-century pianist Alfred "Cortot," who edited an edition of Chopin's works, compared the sound of this prelude to "Delicious recollections" that "float like perfume through the memory."
Already, then, there seems to be something a bit sad about this character. She seems stuck in the past, as if she's pining for her glory days. Indeed, Chopin's music itself is often used (in film scores, for example) as a shorthand for romantic wistfulness. And as the next stanza unfolds, the Chopin/Cortot allusion will take on an ironic quality: for this aging belle, recollection isn't really "Delicious" or "light" as perfume. Her memories are a "heavy" burden, to the point where she's experiencing some sort of personal crisis.
In general, the poem will often handle its allusions—and it contains many!—in a critical or ironic way, introducing quotations in order to challenge them or undermine their authority. This device becomes central to the poem's larger, feminist critique of male authority.