When Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s first collection, Portraits and Elegies (1982), blazed into print, I hadn’t yet learned the alphabet. But by the time I did, she had become one of contemporary poetry’s eminences: a poet whose formal skill, psychological acuity, and erudition placed her above the ordinary fray of the poetry biz. Five collections followed — from The Lamplit Answer (1985) to Heavenly Questions (2010) — evincing a mastery of prosody and profound knowledge of philosophy, history, and Christian theology: learnedness worn lightly. Her honors accrued, in turn, to include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and the Griffin International Poetry Prize; readers hungrily looked for her next book.
But then the poet fell silent.
Heavenly Questions had grappled with the death of her husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, who died in 2002 from complications of stomach cancer, having outlived a prognosis of six months by more than six years. That book was one of the first I reviewed, and lines from the poem “The Light-Gray Soil” stayed with me:
Shambles of grief in daylight under heaven.
I sit among the living, in a park,
Three miles from where he’s laid to rest, three months.
Foot traffic dimly swirls around me, throngs
Of the unbidden pass me, the unburied.
I sit inside a coat he gave me once.
Systole and diastole. Not knowing when
I ceased to stalk the sidewalk, came to rest.
The narrator’s presence among the “unbidden … [and] unburied” recalls the ghostly crowd flowing over T. S. Eliot’s London Bridge. But here it is the foot parade of the living, rather than the dead, that is unnerving. She sits, marveling at “heart-walls moving of their own accord” and, by extension, the mourner’s bodily persistence after great loss. Situating her beloved’s demise in familiar and abstract contexts — with references to Archimedes, Krishna, and Scheherazade —Heavenly Questions is a book of elegies that brims with life. Each time I have returned to it, I have admired the poems’ graceful candor and hoped for more.
I haven’t been alone.
Published last month, Schnackenberg’s St. Matthew Passion breaks a fourteen-year silence with a paean to sound: the collection does not so much meditate on Bach’s sacred oratorio as levitate from it. Designed to be performed by soloists, two choirs, and two orchestras, Bach’s grand-scale work, completed in 1729, enlivens chapters from the Lutheran Gospel of Matthew about the betrayal and death of Christ. The poet describes the composer’s explication of the Biblical story, with all its polyvocal tones of suffering, but her focus is the arrest of art — its seizure of soul and senses — a function so distinct from our workaday lives as to place it next door to religious practice (or human intimacy) in its economic inutility and sustenance.
The narrator is headed out the door on “inconsequential errands” when she realizes she’s left music playing. She stands transfixed, one arm inside a coat sleeve, as Bach’s pageantry envelops her:
A rising minor sixth unseals the sound.
The violin, engulfed
By what has happened, brings the room
Into another state of being. A seventh sense.
Its aria, self-crucifying, brief,
Is trying to extend
A wordless vocal line
As if the violin caught sight
Of bonfire-lit Jerusalem.
Instruments are aural actors in Bach’s oratorio as we witness Peter’s remorse and the messiah’s abandonment. Schnackenberg’s narrator remains riveted, “As if I’m physically unable / Not to hear it to the end,” aware of the tension between her daily tasks and the music’s magnetic pull: “As if there’s nothing left on earth / For me to do but stand and listen. / As if listening could help.” The poet juxtaposes practical demands, which turn us into caretakers of our material lives, versus the demand of art, which arrests our weary attention, fulfilling it as no task can.
The poem makes this argument while, in fact, enlivening it. In the penultimate poem, “Bethany,” there is a moment of electric recognition between Magdalen and Jesus in the leper’s house before his death; Magdalen is “Who had seen in him that love / Without which life is little more / Than empty errands,” and we imagine a dyad — of two persons —purposed by (and for) each other’s being. Later, Jesus foresees his resurrection and their reunion:
The petrichor of opened earth
Beneath a gardener’s rake at 6 a.m.
The shining blur
Of lightning-scrubbed, limestone Jerusalem.
And Magdalene approaching, unaware
That he already stood awaiting her.
The slant-rhymes of “6 a.m.” and “Jerusalem” and “blur” and “her” are typical of Schnackenberg’s ability to play a full subtle range of notes. In the last poem, she turns to the figure of Bach himself after cataract surgery left him blind and unable to complete The Art of the Fugue before his death in 1750. She imagines an oboe’s “brush of sound … Blind, alone, [it] / Disworlds itself, intent // On moving past the end,” as music resists its maker’s finality: “a spirit passing through a wall, unhurt” in the afterlife of artistic creation.
Readers will revel in this book’s mixture of luminosity and linguistic control so rarely seen — or reliably achieved — in poetry, and at Schnackenberg’s continuing music.
[Published by Arrowsmith Press on October 15, 2024, 100 pages, $18.00 paperback]