Heavenly Questions Poems [Paperback]

Heavenly Questions, the first new collection of poems from Gjertrud Schnackenberg since her critically acclaimedThe 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 Questionsis a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovationand, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

What a superb poet she is, and what a range of original sensibility, what private music, in the less well-worn emotions. Nadine Gordimer on Gjertrud Schnackenberg

This sometimes heartbreaking, always ornate sixth collection will please [Schnackenberg's] admirers & as before, Schnackenberg bestows her gifts of diction on scientific wonderments, on the horrors of history, and on the religious and philosophical texts of the past. Publisher's Weekly

Gjertrud Schnackenberg's new book,Heavenly Questions... is perhaps the most powerful elegy written in English by a poet in any recent memory, and it is a triumphant consummation of Schnackenberg's own work. In it, a poet of wide learning and traditional poetic form has been hurt into outraged and incandescent song. Karl Kirchwey,Slate

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

Schnackenberg has written nothing less than a Miltonic book-length poem on eternity, infinity, and tlC×