Gjertrud Schnackenberg

I really enjoyed delving into Schnackenber's poetry. I could just randomly open to a page and enjoy the rhythm of her words, and her stream of thought and imagery. This is a basically her first three books in one volume.

She manages to bind the physical and the spiritual together, that might be almost sacramental. The title poem starts off: My father at the dictionary-stand / Touches the page to full understand / the lamplit answer ... And then: ...following each X I awkward move my needle through the word whose root is love. She then manages to sew in Christ's passion with her own fumbling sewing, quite remarkable.

Other poems pay homage to Osip Mandelstam, Charles Darwin, and Andrea Mantegna.… (mehr)

At last, a poet with no trace of ADD. Schnackenberg thinks, and writes, and re-writes, at the level of the page, the long poem, and the book, always thinking of the resonance of lines that will be echoed or repeated hours or days later. It reminds me of Newman's remarks in the Sonata books that a sense of large-scale form is the rarest quality among the 18th and 19th century composers he studied. It's wonderful enough that Schnackenberg has a sense of large-scale form: and the sense she has is also interesting. 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.… (mehr)