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Heavenly Questions: Poems
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.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Hardcover
First published October 12, 2010
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August 3, 2022Original Writing
Schnackenberg thinks, and writes, and re-writes, at the level of the page, the long poem, and the book, thinking of the resonance of lines that will be echoed or repeated hours or days later. This book reminds me of William Newman's remarks in his books on sonatas that a sense of large-scale form is the rarest quality among the 18th and 19th century composers he studied. Schnackenberg's sense of large-scale form is also interesting in itself. It involves partial or literal repetitions of images, lines, and stanzas, the sort of repetition that might once have been called incantatory, except that her sense isn't rhythmic or geometrical or symmetrical in any clear way; it's episodic, and I wonder if its real precedent might not be Whitman.
It's the form itself that keeps me reading, even though this book is also a very dramatic and affecting narrative of the death of her partner. He dies in an especially abstract poem, which -- along with passages taken from the Mahabharata -- are a little too Transcendental (again in the New England sense) to work along with the more realist, first-person narratives of the hospital, nurses, and doctors. I wonder if, in another decade, she might produce something that is more purely speculative, stripped both of the mythologizing that has preoccupied her, and also of the vestiges of confessional poetry that are interpolated throughout this book. The strongest individual passages are ones that describe single ideas or experiences: the bright light cast by a window onto a wall, which leads her to so many thoughts about death; and the hopelessness of counting grains of sand (or making sense and order from the world). I can imagine a book made only of those.
Schnackenberg thinks, and writes, and re-writes, at the level of the page, the long poem, and the book, thinking of the resonance of lines that will be echoed or repeated hours or days later. This book reminds me of William Newman's remarks in his books on sonatas that a sense of large-scale form is the rarest quality among the 18th and 19th century composers he studied. Schnackenberg's sense of large-scale form is also interesting in itself. It involves partial or literal repetitions of images, lines, and stanzas, the sort of repetition that might once have been called incantatory, except that her sense isn't rhythmic or geometrical or symmetrical in any clear way; it's episodic, and I wonder if its real precedent might not be Whitman.
It's the form itself that keeps me reading, even though this book is also a very dramatic and affecting narrative of the death of her partner. He dies in an especially abstract poem, which -- along with passages taken from the Mahabharata -- are a little too Transcendental (again in the New England sense) to work along with the more realist, first-person narratives of the hospital, nurses, and doctors. I wonder if, in another decade, she might produce something that is more purely speculative, stripped both of the mythologizing that has preoccupied her, and also of the vestiges of confessional poetry that are interpolated throughout this book. The strongest individual passages are ones that describe single ideas or experiences: the bright light cast by a window onto a wall, which leads her to so many thoughts about death; and the hopelessness of counting grains of sand (or making sense and order from the world). I can imagine a book made only of those.
August 2, 2012
I may come back to this review over the weekend. I've admired Schnackenberg's poetry over the years, but this collection, her most personal (which is about the death of her husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick) is a difficult and complicated read. Part of the problem may be with me, since GS draws considerably on the Bhagavad Gita, a work I'm unfamiliar with. Still, I sense a gulf here that's never really bridged. These poems (6 very long poems) work best when GS is in the hospital room with her husband (who she clearly loved), where the nitty gritty, seemingly minute by minute details of the death of a loved one are captured in GS's smooth blank verse. You hear the rhyme, but you rarely notice it, since you're focusing on the unbearable clinical details and the heavy grief of the poet and wife. Where this faltered for me, was when she switched to the cosmic What's it All Mean? Rather than "switching," I would be hoping more for a blending. I'm sure that she's attempting to do this, but I was never convinced, at least not in a way that moved me (when she had her mythic hat on). But as I said, this is a complicated read, and GS is a poet who needs to be revisited. Upon rereading, I may then hear her music better (I will also need to read the Bhagavad Gita). This could well be a 5 star read, but one that requires some more work from this reader.
March 6, 2020
heartbreaking study on grief and loss, short and bittersweet
December 26, 2012
Loss held to the light, examined down to the microscopic levels, the imagery becomes more wonderful; the sadness becoming not simpler but complex exponentially, ten-fold in its overwhelming power. In the gauzy, floating aftermath of tragedy, this is the clear-eyed witness who recalls the details no one else would (or could) consent to remember.
“Black curtains sewn from bolts of consciousness
Are held aside by seraphs in black corners:
A stream of flowing atoms, held aside.
The presentation of a hidden sight:
Anatomy, which means the ‘cutting open,’
From atoms, meaning the ‘uncuttables,’
The indivisibles, the Fabrica,
The template of the ‘pre-existing I’—
Intangible, the fabric tourniquets
The seraphs tie and tie with anxious hands—
But when they turn, to see it for themselves,
Atoms unbind, down to their nuclei:
“The mortal body spectral to the core.
An image no one made, or made by God,
Or self-made, self-dissolving, self-aware.
Who then, or what, hallucinated this?
The tragedy of being only this,
Aristotle’s thisness, nothing more…”
from “Sublimaze”
“Black curtains sewn from bolts of consciousness
Are held aside by seraphs in black corners:
A stream of flowing atoms, held aside.
The presentation of a hidden sight:
Anatomy, which means the ‘cutting open,’
From atoms, meaning the ‘uncuttables,’
The indivisibles, the Fabrica,
The template of the ‘pre-existing I’—
Intangible, the fabric tourniquets
The seraphs tie and tie with anxious hands—
But when they turn, to see it for themselves,
Atoms unbind, down to their nuclei:
“The mortal body spectral to the core.
An image no one made, or made by God,
Or self-made, self-dissolving, self-aware.
Who then, or what, hallucinated this?
The tragedy of being only this,
Aristotle’s thisness, nothing more…”
from “Sublimaze”
August 1, 2021
Challenging in terms of both subject matter and form, but also essential because of both of those. Formalism gets a bad rep these days, but Schnackenberg is perhaps one of (if not the best) living poet with an attention to blank verse. Unless your brain's ear is very, very sharp, these poems are best experienced when reading aloud. Scan them if you want to go one step further, to really see how she inverts and juxtaposes meter in something akin to waves lapping at the sand.
October 12, 2010
First read Ms Schnackenberg in an Atlantic Monthly magazine. I was amazed by her poem submitted to that issue and waited for October for the the book edition. She did not disappoint - lovely lovely accessible poems. It's a slender volume and very beautiful. I plan to read more of her poems and soon.
May 26, 2020
It felt like falling down a Rabbit Hole of Love.Loss.Time.Science.Meaning.Universe. Both natural and ethereal, the blank verse is just mesmerising. Emotional and Transcendent. And ultimately untouchable.
September 15, 2019
A set of interlocked poems, centering on the death of the poet's parner. Very strong, and moving.
February 29, 2016
Fusiturricula Lullaby and Archimedes Lullaby are my two favorite poems in this amazing book. At first glance I thought, "This book is way over my head." But I read Archimedes Lullaby in a magazine and I could not stop reading it. It was like reading a beautifully crafted obituary for the entire human race. I read it over and over, hoping to memorize the words through osmosis. Then I discovered Ms. Schnackenberg reading Fusiturricula Lullaby on YouTube while accepting the 2011 International Griffin Poetry Prize. (Definitely look for it and listen to it a few times!). It's a difficult poem to read, but to listen? My Lord, it was like reading the ocean with words crashing into my heart again and again. I highly recommend this book...especially if you think it's over your head. It's not...trust me.
May 18, 2011
A short and beautiful book of poetry centered around the author/narrator's loss of her husband to cancer. Rife with allusion (I had to go running for my concise OED and Bulfinch's Mythology a few times) this is a wonderful series of poems and could be quite comforting in your grieving. Don't read on cross-country flights.
March 1, 2011
Devastating, strange, and intellectually-driven, this is a different side of Schnackenberg: more abstract/philosophical and, somehow, thankfully, more personal.
August 17, 2012
Absolutely stunning. Emotionally and formally brilliant.
October 14, 2015
Beautiful book of poetry.
October 31, 2013
Wow. I didn't know poetry could do what she does here. Both inspiring and intimidating.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews