A Gilded Lapse of Time: Poems [Paperback]

Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1994

Nadine Gordimer once remarked that Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poems "move me in a way that I don't really think I have experienced since I first read Rilke at sixteen or seventeen."

A Gilded Lapse of Time, Schnackenberg's third volume, is presented in three sections: the title sequence, concerning a visit to Dante's tomb in Ravenna; "Crux of Radiance," a series of poems exploring the making and unmaking of the image of God in scenes from the Passion narrative; and "A Monument in Utopia," about the destruction of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at the hands of Stalin.

Setting legends of the Creation against history's record of catastrophe, setting acts of miraculous art-making against themes of God's world-making, the poems in A Gilded Lapse of Time search out the relationship between poetry and history, the ways they haunt one another, and the guilt that poetry and history share in one another's unfolding. The poet's treatment of the themes of human and divine handiwork--of earthly and celestial love, faith and refusal, oblivion and remembrance--attains to an incandescent vision of the past as a realm that lies before rather than behind us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As she tours the ghostly Mausoleum of Galla Placidiasic and Dante's tomb at Ravenna, Schnackenberg ( Portraits and Elegies ) finds in Italian Renaissance art the multifarious inspiration for this remarkable collection of poems. Bold enough to address Dante "in paradise," she also does not shy from her chosen themes: the legendary creation of the world, the anguish of Christ, Stalin's destruction of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and the flux between poetry and history. Just as Dante tears the branch from the thorn tree and discovers the human suicides who speak in blood, this poet too draws vital connections between poetic language and mortal pain, and begs Dante, "If you would love them, do this much for them, / To let them be. Or that is what I heard / When I thought poetry was love and I had / Sickened of poetry." Schnackenberg writes best when she endows static art with drama and immediacy, as in her sharp-tongued address to Piero della Francesca's "Soldier Asleep at the Tomb." Her verse is regal and elegant, and her imagery--evoking the glorious, hammered-gold realm of dripping honeycombs, spinning celestial globes and glittering mosaics--repeatedly dazzles and delights. Yet at times her statuesque style is deadeningly inert, and overwrought images can become airless and inscrutable: "In gold glass, monophysite particles swimming upward / Out of the prisons of ecclesiastical geography."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Schnackenberg has turned her erudition, technical mastery, and objectivity to extraordinary account, and has set wide new sights for poets of her generation. She has cracked open the lyric of personal anecdote and set it in the light of history. And she has drawn, from that breached and extended lyric, a pulse that is distinctively her own."—Rosanna Warren, The New Republic

"A Gilded Lapse of Time, [Schnackenberg's] darkest and yet most radiant book, is divided into three poetic sequences so enraptured, so lost in annunciations and resurrections, that they might be called visions . . . [These] new poems have a leisurely grandeur; they are written in a melodic free verse, unfolding phrase by phrase into long, barely sustainable sentences. Less controlled by form than her earlier work, they show an unusual concern with the market of mind and religion, the movement of mind and philosophy. In her seriousness and glamour she is reminiscent of the British poet Geoffrey Hill, who is more repressed and less passionate. These dream visions, where one image shimmers over the next like water over water, glass over glass, sound like the voice of history--accusing, condemning, and rarely forgiving. [This] is one of the most difficult and moving books to appear in recent American poetry."—William Logan, The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (April 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374523991
• ISBN-13: 978-0374523992
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,413,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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