Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992

by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

The poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, whom William Logan once called "the most talented American poet under the age of forty," published her first book of poems in 1982. She has since become one of our most respected authors of verse.

Schnackenberg's first three books, collected in Supernatural Love , show the thrilling evolution of a unique voice in today's letters. From an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates book by book through the searching, dense, and metaphysical imagery--as well as the cascading syntax--which have become her signature. Whether we are witnessing her classic portrait of Darwin in his last year or discovering the vertiginous brillance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, we find in Schnackenberg gemlike poems offered as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion--and never the same twice.

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2000

Reviews

[Regret Husk]

an incredible collection from a modern master, a true patrician queen

[Teresa]

Schnackenberg is among "the fine poets." Her reviews all speak of her unique abilities as a contemporary poet that prolongs not-so-contemporary verse. I myself think of her as a mystery, though her work is to be praised, it is also stocked full of references that live mostly in the brains of academics or lonley readers of obscure work.

Certainly her use of narrative coupled with her formulaic style make for fabulous little "contained" worlds. Among my favorites were the more accessible works: "Thanksgiving Day..." and "The Bicyclist."

Lovers of Dante should know about her work in "A Gilded Lapse of Time."

[Blakely]

"Paper Cities," "Sonata," and "Snow Melting" are especially amazing.

[kayla goggin]

Snow Melting
Snow melting when I left you, and I took
This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow
Before I left, exposed beside a brook
Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know,

Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day.
Though at the time her wild human hand
Had gestured inexplicably, I say
Her meaning now is more than I can stand.

We’ve reasons, we have reasons, so we say,
For giving love, and for withholding it.
I who would love must marvel at the way
I know aloneness when I’m holding it,

Know near and far as words for live and die,
Know distance, as I’m trying to draw near,
Growing immense, and know, but don’t know why,
Things seen up close enlarge, then disappear.

Tonight this small room seems too huge to cross.
And my life is that looming kind of place.
Here, left with this alone, and at a loss
I hold an alien and vacant face

Which shrinks away, and yet is magnified–
More so than I seem able to explain.
Tonight the giant galaxies outside
Are tiny, tiny on my windowpane.

[Katharine Holden]

"Snow Melting" is a wonderful poem.

[Phil]

'Prodigious' I think is the only word appropriate to this work. Prodigious in the skill, poise and maturity even of the poems written in the author's early 20s; prodigious in the depth and weight of its seriousness; prodigious in the exactitude, complexity, and colour of its imagery, and the sheer profusion thereof; prodigious in its structure and its tightness, its almost baroque development; prodigious in its knowledge of history, poetry, and sundry other liberal disciplines; prodigious in its range of subject matter; prodigious in its quantity and the sweep of the writing career it embodies. This is a prodigious body of poems - dense, intellectually and artistically accomplished. There is so much here to admire that it's almost possible to forget that poetry is something I used to love. And that's the problem I have with this work: I can see that it's good; I can see that it's very, very good; I can see what it does and how it does it and I can readily admit that half the poets I truly love can't do it half as cleverly or without considerably greater effort. But I can't love it. In fact, I can't remember a single line. It's almost too prodigious.

[Lauren]

She can really slam down some forms. I especially liked her long poem version of Sleeping Beauty.

[Megan Stolz]

I love what Schnackenberg does with form. Satisfying to read; somehow she captures planets in the details.

[Victor]

Fascinating, beautiful poetry.