Description
Book SynopsisGjertrud 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. The book won her the Griffin Prize International Poetry Prize.
Trade ReviewI've just discovered a wonderful American poet called Gjertrud Schnackenberg - she really is called that - and I wish I had the time to catch up with everything she's done. I think she's brilliant. -- Clive James * BBC Two's Front Row Late: When Mary Beard met Clive James *
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 *
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 *
