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Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1953. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanites. The Throne of Labdacus received the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and Heavenly Questions received the 2011 Griffin International Prize for Poetry.
PRAISE FOR SCHNACKENBERG Schnackenberg's meditative latest, her first since 2010's Heavenly Questions, offers a response to Bach's St. Matthew Passion that reflects on music and the act of listening. ""I'm standing/ In the presence/ Of his wild tribulation,"" she writes, considering questions of craft through this studied attention and immersion in sound, ""As if listening could help."" Schnackenberg is an adept interpreter and participant in Bach's music (""A sound so charged with care/ It turns its listeners/ Into involuntary witnesses""), meeting it on its own terms and relating to the ""secret"" behind his genius: ""Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, / writing much, and endless self-correction, / that is my secret."" Much like the music this collection is in dialogue with, Schnackenberg's poems are interested in ""intimate compassion."" They pose questions about the sacred (""What is a holy sound? What constitutes/ The sound of holiness?"") as she finds at the core of Bach's composition qualities of art, holiness, and love, ""Without which life is little more/ Than empty errands."" Stately and subtly layered, these poems do justice to the complexity and beauty of Bach's composition. -Publishers Weekly ""What a superb poet she is, and what a range of original sensibility, what private music, in the less well-worn emotions."" -Nadine Gordimer For Supernatural Love (2000, FSG): ""A visionary encounter with 'the source of poetry.'"" -Rosanna Warren ""Profound, sweeping, emotional...One thinks of Blake's insight, 'Eternity is in love with the productions of time.'"" -Stephen Yenser For Heavenly Questions (2011, FSG): ""There is no one in her generation to equal Schnackenberg's control of the blank-verse line, nor to match her technical abilities..."" -Cynthia Zarin ""...the most powerful elegy written in English by a poet in recent memory, and it is a triumphant consummation of Schnackenberg's own work."" -Karl Kirchwey
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Genealogies of Music and Memory...
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