Supernatural Love, by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $19.00.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg's best book is her first, Portraits and Elegies, though her best single poem is probably the much-anthologized "Supernatural Love," from her second book, A Lamplit Answer, which also contains the lovely poem "Snow Melting." If the implicit judgment here is harsh -- the latter work doesn't measure up to the earlier -- I would immediately temper it by saying that some of the earlier work seems to me a substantial and rare accomplishment. I think people will be reading some of these poems for a long time.
Schnackenberg's particular gift is for a kind of clear density, for making many different strands of experience part of a single, deceptively simple weave. Difficulty dissolves into the fluent lines and surprising rhymes of the finished poem. It's an Elizabeth Bishop sort of gift (and Schnackenberg at times writes every bit as well as Bishop), though much of' the later work, with its literary and historical freight that feels like a kind of borrowed authority, is closer to Robert Lowell. Someone may one day explore Schnackenberg's ideas of and relation to authority -- the way her father in "Supernatural Love" becomes a kind of god ("And call upon his name, `Daddy, Daddy'"), or the extent to which so many poems are pinioned to famous (almost exclusively male) people or works of art. For now, I just want to say that my favorite poem of hers is "Darwin in 1881" (favorite and best aren't necessarily the same thing), a splendid character study of the naturalist in the last moments of his life:
Now done with beetle jaws and beaks of gulls
And bivalve hinges, now, utterly done,
One miracle remains, and only one.
An ocean swell of sickness rushes, pulls,
He leans against the fence
And lights a cigarette and deeply draws,
Done with fixed laws,
Done with experiments
Within his greenhouse heaven where
His offspring, Frank, for half the afternoon
Played, like an awkward angel, his bassoon
Into the humid air
So he could tell
If sound would make a Venus's-flytrap close.
And, done for good with scientific prose,
That raging hell
Of tortured grammars writhing on their stakes....
In a way Schnackenberg's work enacts one of the chief difficulties of poets in our time: what will I write about? When a poet spoke for a community, that was more obvious, and even when those ties had been largely severed, there was still a subject in the loss. You feel Schnackenberg at this point in her first book, one section of which concerns itself with imagined (I guess they are imagined) inhabitants of a house she has come to live in, and you feel her drifting beyond this point in subsequent books, which are almost exclusively about other works of art or dead artists. The poems are consistently impressive, but there is something increasingly pinched and narrowed about them. There are certain words you can't imagine her using, certain experiences you can't imagine her treating. Raw colloquialisms, the rough textures of contemporary experience, the body's whole rude chaos of decay and need -- these seem to have no place in her poems. By the time you get to her most recent book, Tile Throne of Labdacus, a numb book-length poem focused on the nameless slave who saved Oedipus (I don't know if I would have even figured this out without the book jacket information), you feel very strongly the force of these refusals, and not as warped formal energies in the way you feel this dynamic in, say, Hart Crane, but simply as refusals.
Each poet's deepest test is different, and what we call risk in one may be the mildest sort of security in another. A poet who finds it too easy to bleed onto her pages may need a sort of verse tourniquet; a poet who finds it too difficult may need a knife. There are poets who ought to be locked in libraries for years without pen or paper, and some need nothing so much as a decade at Disneyland. I have in the past inveighed so heavily against the cozily anecdotal, the broken-prose confessions, the whole contemporary mush of me, me, me, that I find it strange to come across a poet whose work I truly admire but which seems to me not personal enough, evasive in the very impeccability of its style. And yet I think it's no accident that "Supernatural Love" returns to the subject matter that enlivened Schnackenberg's first book, that "Snow Melting" seems to be about the very painful end of a relationship ("Tonight this small room seems too huge to cross. / And my life is that looming kind of place."). Both poems are like islands of genuine feeling in a sea of mere technique.
In the end, of course, it's the islands that will be remembered, and not the waters by which a poet made her way between them (or, in this case, from them). We forget how rarely a poet of substantial early achievement "develops," as well as how common it is to have simply a decade or so of real originality over the course of one's life. That we can't know this about ourselves is, I suppose, a kind of grace.
CHRISTIAN WIMAN has new work just out of forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.