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the complete review - poetry

Heavenly Questions

by
Gjertrud Schnackenberg

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : fine elegiac poems

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "They are abundant with sensuous imagery as well as some more unexpectedly scientific diction -- the Latin name of a nautilus, or a description of the logarithmic spiral of a seashell. As Schnackenberg alternates between the vast environment of the sea and the enclosed space within hospitals, she creates a touching exploration of the idea of eternity." - Aisha K. Down, The Harvard Crimson
  
  
• "There is a new DNA in this collection, in the spiraling self-creation of shells and also in the portrait of grief as the poet finds herself weeping in a phone booth, looking up his name, "still listed with the living." But most important, the re-creation of love for our benefit" - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Heavenly Questions is a book of grief and the ways of grief. The poems return again and again, in harrowing detail, to the scenes of his illness. Schnackenberg is a poet richly drenched, even drowned, in the classics; but, however much her mind strays to the myth of Theseus or the battles of the Mahabharata, the battleground here is the operating theater and the recovery ward. (...) The poems are moody, dyed in grief, burdened with sorrow, and unutterably dull." - William Logan, The New Criterion
  
  
• "The faux-finishing is gorgeous, but often it masks the substance underneath. And so it is fascinating to watch Schnackenberg deal withmaterial that is outside her hothouse of impressiveeffects. I read her for the moments things go haywire (.....) Schnackenberg's almost calligraphic style is an overcommitment (...) The writing is impeccable and virtuosic. But it cannot compete with the image of that orphaned chess set" - Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "You could certainly call the book, Schnackenberg’s sixth, an elegy, but it is one of an intellectualized kind, where lament becomes an imperative to at least adumbrate philosophical, narrative, and scientific understandings of existence and nonexistence. (...) (T)he remit of Heavenly Questions is indeed immense, with the kind of ambition perhaps only possible when you have nothing to lose. But, line by line, the book invites." - D.H.Tracy, Poetry

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Heavenly Questions consists of six longer poems, two of which are called lullabies -- but none of this is kids' stuff.
       A Note at the beginning of the collection explains that:

Usually translated into English as Heavenly Questions, the ancient poem Tianwen [天问] by QuYuan (c. 340-278 B.C.E.) is a series of unanswerable cosmological, philosophical, and mythological questions

His striking conversation, magic ease
In seeking what the other could, then more,
In understanding, warmly understood;
A quest for truth but not for certainty.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 November 2010

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Links:

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page

• The Harvard Crimson
• The Los Angeles Times
• The New Criterion (scroll down for review)
• Poetry (scroll down for review)
• The Quarterly Conversation
• Slate
• Zoland Poetry

• A Gilded Lapse of Time
• The Lamplit Answer
• Portraits and Elegies
• Supernatural Love
• The Throne of Labdacus

• See Index of Poetry under review

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About the Author:

       American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953. She has won many awards, fellowships, and grants.

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© 2010-2011 the complete review

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