Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“This sometimes heartbreaking, always ornate sixth collection will please [Schnackenberg’s] admirers … as before, Schnackenberg bestows her gifts of diction on scientific wonderments, on the horrors of history, and on the religious and philosophical texts of the past.” Publisher’s Weekly
Review
“Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s new book, Heavenly Questions … is perhaps the most powerful elegy written in English by a poet in any recent memory, and it is a triumphant consummation of Schnackenberg’s own work. In it, a poet of wide learning and traditional poetic form has been hurt into outraged and incandescent song.” Karl Kirchwey, Slate
Review
“Heavenly Questions…is a fascinating invocation of the wonders of eternity, and a human relationship to eternal questions. Schnackenberg pursues these wonders on all fronts — in mathematical iterations as well as references to science and philosophy, and it is this integrated approach, along with the sheer density of her imagery, that characterizes her compelling new poetry collection.” Aisha K. Down, The Harvard Crimson
Review
“Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a pillar of American poetry. This, her sixth collection, is the first in almost ten years. The six long poems form a lullaby to a tired universe — in the background a reader hears a great crashing to statues falling and tectonic plates scraping past each other. In the foreground the poet sits at the bedside of her dying husband.…And so these are love poems, some of the most beautiful you will ever read.…There is a new DNA in this collection, in the spiraling self-creation of shells and also in the portrait of grief.…But most important, the re-creation of love for our benefit.” Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
Review
“Heavenly Questions [is Schnackenberg’s] best book and one of the most interesting books in recent American poetry. It is a book about its own failures to conjure the lost beloved, and about its own temptation to offer, and to accept, false consolation....Part of Schnackenberg’s power, and part of her appeal, is to found her own language on literary terra firma even as she explores the shifting sands of mortal life....This is powerful writing.” Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books
About the Author
Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1953. The Throne of Labdacus (FSG, 2000) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.