Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Heavenly Questions, the first new collection of poems from Gjertrud Schnackenberg since her critically acclaimed The Throne of Labdacus, finds her at the height of her talents and showcases her continued growth as an artist. In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own. An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation--and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

Poems

Heavenly Questions

A new collection of poems by the author of A Guilded Lapse of Time revisits the story of Oedipus and Apollo to probe themes of fate and necessity. Reprint.

A Poem

The Throne of Labdacus

Nadine Gordimer once remarked that Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poems "move me in a way that I don't really think I have experienced since I first read Rilke at sixteen or seventeen." A Gilded Lapse of Time, Schnackenberg's third volume, is presented in three sections: the title sequence, concerning a visit to Dante's tomb in Ravenna; "Crux of Radiance," a series of poems exploring the making and unmaking of the image of God in scenes from the Passion narrative; and "A Monument in Utopia," about the destruction of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at the hands of Stalin. Setting legends of the Creation against history's record of catastrophe, setting acts of miraculous art-making against themes of God's world-making, the poems in A Gilded Lapse of Time search out the relationship between poetry and history, the ways they haunt one another, and the guilt that poetry and history share in one another's unfolding. The poet's treatment of the themes of human and divine handiwork--of earthly and celestial love, faith and refusal, oblivion and remembrance--attains to an incandescent vision of the past as a realm that lies before rather than behind us.

A Gilded Lapse of Time

Collects late-twentieth-century poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg's first three books of poetry into one volume.

Poems 1976-1992

Supernatural Love

Portraits and Elegies

Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a major voice in American poetry known for the sensuous richness of her imaginatively daring poetry of ideas. Her first new book for a decade, Heavenly Questions is a setting of six long poems of passion, mourning and redemption. Shifting effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, it is her most deeply compassionate and strikingly personal book of poetry as well as a powerful work of intellectual, aesthetic and technical innovation. 'Schnackenberg is best known for her stunning command of prosody. She is the most accomplished master of blank verse on the planet... Her dream songs remain both impossibly intimate and formally perfect: a double monument to love and to grief. Here is the most powerful love poetry of our time' - Eliza Griswold, The American Prospect 'It is perhaps the most powerful elegy written in English by any poet in recent memory, and it is a triumphant consummation of Schnackenberg's own work... But no elegy succeeds unless it is also a love poem, and with astounding dignity Schnackenberg calls up the physical and emotional intimacy that can exist between lovers' - Karl Kirchwey, Slate 'The momentum of her lines suggests grief's endless reprisals and perpetuations, and the rhythms of an infinite, recombinant universe. In six long poems, which constitute a single integrated work, Heavenly Questions guides us through the transformations of bereavement. The effect is immersive and utterly compelling... The ambition and ingenuity of Heavenly Questions reminds us of what it is possible for elegiac poetry to achieve, particularly given a longer form; but the courage at its core, the tremendous, vulnerable dignity, the refusal to seek easy consolations, or depict such a grief in familiar terms, are what hold the most power to enchant and impress, and make these poems resonate long after the book has been closed' - Frances Leviston, The Guardian Click here to read the full review 'The title comes from the "Heavenly Questions" of Qu Yuan (c. 300 BCE), cosmological riddles he left on temple walls...Schnackenberg has written nothing less than a Miltonic book-length poem on eternity, infinity, and the meaning of life' - D.H. Tracy, Poetry 'In Heavenly Questions Schnackenberg's poems achieve a new degree of human intimacy as a result of their staggering encounter with death... It's as though the renewing faith in the power of beauty that has always animated Schnackenberg's work were itself mortally wounded; as we watch it struggle to regain its footing, we gaze more and more deeply into its striving heart' - Ann Kjellberg, Little Star

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

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