First English edition. Blurb by Nadine Gordimer. Fine. vi , 83, 3 pages. stiff paper wrappers.. small 8vo..

The Lamplit Answer (Hutchinson Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Schnackenberg, Gjertrud

Poetry

Hutchinson

This work of spiritual imagination appears seven years after Gjertrud Schnackenberg's second book, of which Nadine Gordimer wrote that it contains "poems that move me in a way that I don't really think I have experienced since I first read Rilke at sixteen or seventeen." A Gilded Lapse of Time is in three sections: the title sequence, surrounding a visit to Dante's tomb in Ravenna; "Crux of Radiance," a series of poems exploring the making and unmaking of the image of God in scenes from the Passion narrative; and "A Monument in Utopia," about the destruction of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at Stalin's hands. Setting legends of the Creation against history's record of catastrophe, setting acts of miraculous art-making against themes of God's world-making, these poems search out the relationship between poetry and history, the ways they haunt one another, and the guilt that poetry and history share in one another's unfolding. Her treatment of the themes of human and divine handiwork, of earthly and celestial love, of faith and refusal, of oblivion and remembrance, attains to an incandescent vision of the past as a realm that lies before rather than behind us.

A Gilded Lapse of Time

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The award-winning poet's second poetry collection includes several works of light verse and a free verse poem about Chopin's first year in Paris, but is dominated by rhymed and cadenced poems concerning significant historical lives and events

The Lamplit Answer

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A new collection of poems by the author of A Guilded Lapse of Time revisits the story of Oedipus and Apollo to probe themes of fate and necessity.

The Throne of Labdacus

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.

Heavenly Questions: Poems

Softcover. Pristine condition. Clean pages and cover. No markings or wear. Original cover art.

Portraits and Elegies

Nadine Gordimer once remarked that Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poems "move me in a way that I don't really think I have experienced since I first read Rilke at sixteen or seventeen."
A Gilded Lapse of Time, Schnackenberg's third volume, is presented in three sections: the title sequence, concerning a visit to Dante's tomb in Ravenna; "Crux of Radiance," a series of poems exploring the making and unmaking of the image of God in scenes from the Passion narrative; and "A Monument in Utopia," about the destruction of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at the hands of Stalin.
Setting legends of the Creation against history's record of catastrophe, setting acts of miraculous art-making against themes of God's world-making, the poems in A Gilded Lapse of Time search out the relationship between poetry and history, the ways they haunt one another, and the guilt that poetry and history share in one another's unfolding. The poet's treatment of the themes of human and divine handiwork--of earthly and celestial love, faith and refusal, oblivion and remembrance--attains to an incandescent vision of the past as a realm that lies before rather than behind us.

A Gilded Lapse of Time: Poems

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.

Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992

Winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2000.
The first warning passing through Thebes-- As small a sound
As a housefly alighting from Persia And stamping its foot on a mound
Where the palace once was; As small a moth chewing thread
In the tyrant's robe; As small as the cresting of red
In the rim of an injured eye; as small As the sound of a human conceived
A compelling, lyric telling of the story of Oedipus, and of "what happens outside the play," in the experience of the god who is its presiding oracle: Apollo, the god of poetry, music, and healing. Given the task of setting the Sophocles text to music, the god is woven reluctantly into its world of riddles, unanswered questions, partially disclosed objects, and ambiguous second-hand reports--a world where the gods, as much as humans, are subject to the binding claims of fate and necessity.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg draws upon ancient fragments and allusions to Oedipus and upon folk-tales about the origin of the Greek alphabet to present a vision of the tragedy's essential unknowableness, where the destinies of gods and humans secretly mingle in the unfolding of time, and where Zeus's laws, which suffuse the great tragedy's world, are as invisible and as inviolable as physical laws.

The Throne of Labdacus: A Poem

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Schnackenberg, Gjertrud. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Schnackenberg, Gjertrud

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Schnackenberg, Gjertrud. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Lamplit Answer (Hutchinson Poets)

A Gilded Lapse of Time

The Lamplit Answer

The Throne of Labdacus

Heavenly Questions: Poems

The Lamplit Answer

Portraits and Elegies

A Gilded Lapse of Time: Poems

Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992

The Throne of Labdacus: A Poem