Heavenly Questions: Poems

by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Overview

Heavenly Questions, the first new collection of poems from Gjertrud Schnackenberg since her critically acclaimed The 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 Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374533045
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/27/2011
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.16(d)

About the Author

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1953. The Throne of Labdacus (FSG, 2000) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

ARCHIMEDES LULLABY

A visit to the shores of lullabies,

Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,

Is seated in his half-filled universe

And sorting out the grains by shape and size.

Above his head a water-ceiling sways,

Beneath his feet the ancient magma-flows

Of metamorphic, underearth plateaus

Are moving in slow motion, all in play,

And all is give-and-take, all comes and goes,

And hush now, all is well now, close your eyes,

Distant ocean-engines pulverize

Their underwater mountains, coarse to fine,

In granite-crumbs and flakes of mica gold

And particles of ancient olivine;

And water waves sweep back and forth again,

Materialize, and dematerialize,

Retrieving counted grains and dropping more

Uncounted grains in heaps along a shore

Of granite-particled infinities,

Amassing shores for drawing diagrams.

Behind him, on the shores of Sicily,

His legendary works accumulate:

Discarded toys, forgotten thought-machines,

And wonder-works, dismantled on the sand:

A ship, reduced to ashes by a mirror;

A planetarium in hammered bronze

Whose heaven rotates, taking its own measure;

The fragment of a marble monument—

A sphere inscribed within a cylinder—

Forgotten, overgrown with stems and leaves;

A vessel, filled with water to the brim

To weigh Hiero’s golden diadem,

But emptied on its side now, overturned;

And numbers fading in papyrus scrolls

He sent by ship to Alexandria:

Approximated ratios glimpsed within

The wondrously unlocked square root of 3;

And 3.141 . . . : a treasure-store

Marcellus cannot plunder; cannot use;

And 1.618 . . . : the weightless gold

No scales are needed for, no lock and key,

Ratio divine, untouchable in war;

And block-and-tackle pulleys; water-screws

And other spirals, angles, cubes, and spheres;

The iron lever rusting at his feet

A relic from the time he told the King

Assembled with the court: Give me a place

Whereon to stand, and I will move the earth;

And as he spoke, another earth appeared,

One grain among innumerable grains

And nearly weightless as a grain of sand,

And high above the giant fortress walls

Of Syracuse his mental catapults

Are hurling mental boulders one by one

At Roman warships sinking in the bay—

Far off, a shipwreck; up close, bubble foam

Sweeps forward on the sand, sweeps off again

With remnants of a Roman war machine—

Even the Roman sailors, disembarked

From sinking ships, and rowing toward the beach

In lifeboats set afloat from battleships

Now sinking in the distance—even they

Are falling fast asleep above their oars,

And undulating ropes lash in the wakes

And bob along, the ropes asleep as well—

All drifting past the legendary shores

Where Archimedes counts the grains of sand . . .

It never ends, this dire need to know,

This need to see a diagram unfold

In silent angles, drawing in the sand,

This need to see a diagram achieve

Self-organizing equilibrium

Among the mica flakes and granite-crumbs,

This need to fill the universe with sand,

And all in play, with everything in play,

And every night before he falls asleep

In cold and heavy sand, he leans to brush

The clinging sand-grains from his naked feet

And myriads appear, self-multiply,

And multiply again: Let this be X,

Let this be X times X, and let there be

More myriads of zeroes grain by grain

In sacks of sand where one by one by one

More sacks of sand are filled with other grains,

Let numbers coalesce and re-emerge

Unharmed by coalescence and unchanged;

And always let a higher number form

And every single number have a name:

Ten to the power of the sixty-third;

A vigintillion grains of sand, times eight;

Eight vigintillion, plus or minus one:

A number for the demiurge to ponder,

Sprawling in his sleep among the bags

Of sand grains pouring into Syracuse

Where Archimedes draws a diagram . . .

It never ends, this dire need to know,

Even beneath the smoking sword of war

A Roman soldier raises overhead

Mid-thought, mid-diagram, even before

He finishes the drawing at his feet,

Even before he has the chance to say:

Let whosoever can, complete—but then

A soldier lifts the smoking sword of war,

And he’s forgotten what he meant to say.

Black heavens, pouring into Syracuse

In granite-particled infinities

Amass another shoreline at his feet.

He falls asleep in cold and heavy sand

And finishes his drawing in his sleep

Before the edges of the lines he drew

Begin to crumble grain by grain by grain

With everything in play, and all in play

A myriad appears; self-multiplies;

And waves of water sweep around and through,

Retrieving counted grains and dropping more

Uncounted grains in heaps in lullabies

Where Archimedes falls asleep and sees

A grain of sand appear: the final grain;

Ten to the power of the sixty-third,

Times eight; the sum complete before his eyes;

And then another grain is added: One;

A sack of sand tips over, pours away,

Black heavens pouring out infinities

Of sleeping islands, sleeping Sicilies,

And water waves appear and sweep away

Forgotten wonder-works and thought-machines,

And heaven revolves, a planetarium

For calculating distances between

The heavenly stars and measuring their size,

All twirling in slow motion, slower still,

And slower still, and all is sleep and peace,

The universe asleep before his eyes

Beside an ocean moving in its sleep,

And distant ocean-engines pulverize

Their underwater mountains, coarse to fine,

And water waves appear and disappear

Retrieving counted grains and leaving more

Uncounted grains in heaps in lullabies,

Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,

Is seated in his half-filled universe,

And sorting out the grains by shape and size,

And all is well now, hush now, close your eyes,

And one . . . by one . . . by one . . . by one . . . by one . . .

The flakes of mica gold and granite-crumbs

Materialize, and dematerialize.

Editorial Reviews

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 the meaning of life, and it is ... unarid and fleet. She mills her ponderous themes, by imaginative inhabitation and force of skill ... into fairy dust. I wonder who else would try such a thing as Heavenly Questions, and how far back you would have to go to find someone who could even fail at it.” —D. H. Tracy, Poetry

“Heavenly Questions ... is a fascinating invocation of the wonders of eternity, and a human relationship to eternal questions. Schnackenberg pursues these wonders on all fronts—in mathematical iterations as well as references to science and philosophy, and it is this integrated approach, along with the sheer density of her imagery, that characterizes her compelling new poetry collection.” —Aisha K. Down, The Harvard Crimson

“Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a pillar of American poetry.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times

“Gjertrud Schackenberg in Heavenly Questions . . . offer[s] poems in a meticulous blank verse that gives them the stately power and authority of Chapman's Homer and its legions of descendants . . . I don't think I've ever felt so strongly a loss experienced only through verse . . . It is Schnackenberg's great achievement to have revealed how, in the dark of the hospital night, the small and large, the personal and the impersonal, the purposeful and the pointless, all collapse into one, the universe, still inexplicable, still impersonal, reduced for that moment to the force of a simple, urgent desire ... All we have is love; when love is all we have, we create memorials to help us hold onto that love ... Heavenly Questions is that memorial, and, as such, the answer to its own questions.” —Levi Stahl, The Quarterly Conversation

“There is no one in her generation to equal Schnackenberg's control of the blank-verse line, nor to match her technical abilities ... In Heavenly Questions, the sounds are what she herself describes as 'bindings falling from the swaddled drum.' The transfixed speech is Una's from Spenser's Faerie Queen.” —Cynthia Zarin, The Yale Review

“[Heavenly Questions] tell[s] a story of epic scale … This magic comes to us in a great upheaval of brilliant prosodic rule-breaking and reinvention … Reading this book is like reading the ocean, its swells and furrows, its secrets fleetingly revealed and then blown away in gusts of foam and spray or folded back into nothing but water. Heavenly Questions demands that we come face to face with matters of mortal importance, and it does so in a wildly original music that is passionate, transporting, and heart-rending.” —Judges' Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize 2011 International Shortlist

“In Heavenly Questions Schnackenberg's poems achieve a new degree of human intimacy as a result of their staggering encounter with death... It's as though the renewing faith in the power of beauty that has always animated Schnackenberg's work were itself mortally wounded; as we watch it struggle to regain its footing, we gaze more and more deeply into its striving heart.” —Ann Kjellberg, Little Star

“Gjertrud Schnackenberg's new book, Heavenly Questions . . . invokes the power of numbers, to build a memorial . . . in scrolling pentameter; but Schnackenberg approaches form as a generative as much as a limiting force. The momentum of her lines suggests grief's endless reprisals and perpetuations, and the rhythms of an infinite, recombinant universe. In six long poems, which constitute a single integrated work, Heavenly Questions guides us through the transformations of bereavement. The effect is immersive and utterly compelling . . . As the soft graphite shears off, and life and love break midway through, so the book ends: 'Here the god of writers broke his pen.' The ambition and ingenuity of Heavenly Questions reminds us of what it is possible for elegiac poetry to achieve, particularly given a longer form; but the courage at its core, the tremendous, vulnerable dignity, the refusal to seek easy consolations, or depict such a grief in familiar terms, are what hold the most power to enchant and impress, and make these poems resonate long after the book has been closed.” —Frances Leviston, The Guardian

From the Publisher

If one could see the world in a grain of sand, how would it look? The question informs the poems in this new work by Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Schnackenberg. The book's theme is suggested by a centerpiece poem, which shows Archimedes studying grains of sand in which he can see the ocean as well as the reflections of stars. Set mostly in a hospital room, these six long elegiac poems suggest that there's more to life than death. Because of its subject matter and confessional style, this book is reminiscent of Schnackenberg's first book, Portraits and Elegies, which memorialized her father. But this time, Schnackenberg is writing about the death of a spouse (or someone designated as a spouse), a death that seems very recent—which makes the collection extremely emotionally intense and at times difficult to read. VERDICT One has to admire the poet's talent for rhyme, incremental repetition, meter, literary allusions, knowledge of Greek mythology, and metaphysical thinking as well as the elegant neo-formalist poems that showcase her vision. Yet even though Schnackenberg offers redemption, readers will feel her pain; it's that palpable. Worth reading for those who can bear it.—Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

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