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Schnackenberg's Collected Poems Shine; Her Oedipus Falters REVIEWED BY Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, November 5, 2000
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THE THRONE OF LABDACUSBy Gjertrud Schnackenberg Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 101 pages; $23
SUPERNATURAL LOVEPoems 1976-1992 By Gjertrud Schnackenberg Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages; $19 paperback
The unlikely name Gjertrud Schnackenberg, completely unrecognized outside mandarin poetry circles, belongs to one of the most gifted poets of our time. The book that made her reputation, 1985's ``The Lamplit Answer,'' led Nadine Gordimer to rave that her poems ``move me in a way that I don't really think I have experienced since I first read Rilke at sixteen or seventeen.'' That quote has been dusted off and pressed into service for Schnackenberg's latest book, ``The Throne of Labdacus,'' issued simultaneously with her collected poems, ``Supernatural Love.'' The title poem of the collected edition, as well as the phrase ``lamplit answer,'' were both taken from a spectacular poem in rhyming tercets, a knockout punch in a landmark book. And some will never forget Schnackenberg's metaphysical, mysterious ``Heavenly Feast,'' which the New Yorker first published in the early '80s, commemorating in tight, iambic trimeter writer Simone Weil's death by starvation. Though there were a few weaker notes in ``The Lamplit Answer'' (Schnackenberg has always tended to wander a bit), the best were stunning. So the next book was awaited eagerly. In 1992 she came out with ``A Gilded Lapse of Time,'' in which magical image succeeds magical image in rambling, free- verse lines about masks of bees, mosaics of gold, dripping honeycombs and the gilded apse of celestial globes. Reading it is like eating a dozen profiteroles at once. Each image was dazzling; few had a discernible point. In the dense excess the mind wandered, looking for something crisp, succinct, something that did not drift from line to line. Too often, though, every footnote in ``A Gilded Lapse of Time'' was needed to get a grip on the otherwise incomprehensible associ ations in the poems. But the dreamy, learned blowsiness seemed excusable, given the subject of Paradise and divinity. One hoped ``A Gilded Lapse'' was only a breathtaking experimental one-off. So, again, the next book was eagerly awaited. Now there's ``The Throne of Labdacus'': the story of Oedipus, austerely developed in unmetrical couplets. Small ideas are overworked (for example, the ``small sound'' in the opening chapter, which has unintended comic overtones associated with a housefly ``stamping its foot''); large ideas arrive late and redeem too little. ``The Throne of Labdacus'' feels spun out through redundant abstraction and needless gloss. This is ironic given the precision and tension of Sophocles' play, which is still urgent and immediate after two millennia. The climactic incident arrives somewhere in the middle: The crime of Oedipus is so horrible (``even the god will be frightened'') that the god Apollo was forced to invent the Greek alphabet to describe it. But the horror of Oedipus' crime has been dulled by centuries of retelling and certainly can't compete with the headlines at the checkout counter. In fact, given the amount of incest among the Olympians (Zeus was Hera's brother, right?), surely even they wouldn't stifle a yawn. So Schnackenberg's horror is another threadbare convention rather than a fresh, dramatic force for her verse. That's one reason a sense of inauthenticity pervades. It's the ``watch me watching the sunset'' syndrome, and one cannot help suspecting that Schnackenberg is using Sophocles as a prop, the way her paraphrasing of various passages in the ``Paradiso'' often lent an artificial strength to ``A Gilded Lapse of Time.'' It's fashionable in many quarters to point out how a great or near- great poet was ``harmed'' by formal structure in poetry. But in Schnackenberg's case, meter reined in her excesses and ordered her pandemonium of literary, historical and religious allusions. Plus, she had an extraordinary dexterity and inventiveness in form. It's missed. Don't misunderstand. Like its predecessor, ``The Throne of Labdacus'' is unquestionably intelligent, thematically mature and beautifully envisioned. But overall the verse is weaker and uncompelling, even a little dull. Many will read it with a self-righteous sense of aesthetic duty rather than lively pleasure. We can only hope this isn't a woman with a brilliant future behind her. In any case, the plaudits will continue to fall on her in a shower of gold, for Schnackenberg is something of a darling in the East Coast literary world and still a very gifted poet. But ``Supernatural Love'' is a revealing chronology, and a better buy in paperback than the new ``Throne of Labdacus'' in hardcover. Cynthia Haven is a regular contributor to the Cortland Review. |
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