If you enjoy the poetry of Thomas Hardy, W.B.Yeats, Robert Frost, Tennyson,Longfellow, John Masefield, Wilfred Owen, Phyllis McGinley, C.S.Lewis, Walter de la Mare, W.H.Auden, E.A.Robinson, A.E.Housman, Calvin Miller, Richard Wilbur, A.E.Stallings, you will revel in this collection of a lifetime's oeuvre.

In the words of Auden: In the eyes of every author,/ His past work falls into four classes:/ First, pure rubbish he regrets/ Ever having given bother/ To conceive. Second, mixed masses-/ For him, most painful - mongrel pets/ Of good ideas which impatience,/ Incompetency brought to nil/ (Fair notions fatally injured). Third,/ Lacking importance par creations:/ These three, bulk of the oeuvre which skill/ Plied. Fourth, poems worth the warmest word/ Of honest gratefulness from him,/ In volume depressingly slim.

Gjertrud's collection has few of Auden's first three classes. The best verse is the epitome of organizational skill in bringing together meaningful, moving elements into a whole greater than the sum of its parts that 'arrives', 'fulfills' and reaches the reader in a memorable way. Like all good poets, she attempts to amplify what she sees and experiences by probing for correspondences that relate dissimilarities. Through rhymed communication, she invites inquirers to share her discoveries and reveries. Poetic worth is never dependent on sheer quantity, contrary to what Stalin once said about the quality of his armed forces arrayed against Hitler ('quantity has a quality all its own'); Poetic value depends on importance,interest, stimulability, and depth of exploration. Too much poetry published these days is a pretty pond a mile wide and an inch deep. Gjertrud invites us to probe the depths off shore while heading to the surface for appropriate breathing stops. The final merit of a body of poetry is: will it stand the test of time and be referred to again and again, still speaking fresh and anew to each generation as many of the above-mentioned masters. I would suggest that 'Supernatural Love', her most powerful poem to date, achieves the following standard: efficient and effective symbiosis between form, sound, imagery, theme, motion, emotion, thought, music, substance, color, tone, texture, connotatively rich rhyming and spiritual importance. In this magnificent masterpiece, all aspects of poetry cross-pollinate each other in a mysterious, indefinable perichoresis(mutual interpenetration and enhancement creating a whole greater than the mere sum of parts). They are inseparable and,as here displayed, prove that a good poem cannot be said in any other way in any other words. Bravo! A tour de force to be welcomed on all new-formalist poetry shelves.

Her writing is so beautiful -- always so beautiful. This book offers the complete first 3 books of her career, marking the developments of this incredible new formalist.

Okay, I am saying it now for all the world to read, every little bug and bird that zips into this review. This is the book that should win every award flying around us in the known universe, and maybe the unknown universe, too. I hereby nominate this book for the Pulitzer and if the publisher doesn't do it he/she is missing out on one of the few times in his/her life that the action should be taken for the redemption and the welfare of the art itself. There are lots of ultra-chic poets out there writing some kind of dulled down intellectual psuedo crapola and this poet is not one of them. For capturing the true glittering moment in a psychic dream and letting it grow and develop into an unforgettable poem that changes the way the reader perceives the world and human interaction, this poet does it at least four times in every book she has written. When opening a book written by another poet, I am usually brimming with a little jealousy: here is somebody who has a few books, right? I am usually all set to tear apart whatever verse is there and measure myself, my voice, my vision against it. It takes a pretty original kind of imagination to sweep me away and make me forget my original, super-critical intent. But it happens with this poet, it happened. I am very grateful for the beauty and insight that was seeded and grew into living entities in these poems. In short, I am wowed. So I may well be Nobody, like Emily said everybody should be, but I say this book is transcendental all right; the book transcends the meaning of money and I am happy I had the good sense to buy it and recommend it to my friends who are just as critical as me.

This is a weak book from a poet who has done better and should know better. Schnackenberg manages to avoid everything, or almost everything, that is compelling about the Oedipus myth. There is one section, on the metaphoric origins of the Greek alphabet, that is fascinating (in a wholly fantastic sort of way), but the rest of the poem is as dead as the language Schnackenberg is talking about. This is a poet who has moved, in a relatively short time, from writing memorable poems (many of them in traditional forms) to poems that only antiquarians will remember. I thought A Gilded Lapse of Time, the poet's last book, was a fairly significant lapse, but this one goes even further. This is poetry written with an eye toward a MacArthur. The review in the New York Review of Books was a travesty, in my opinion. Caveat emptor.

Her writing in this book is elegant, elegiac modern formalism. She's such a marvelous poet. Reading this book, every word & every syllable feel so perfect. She's a very careful, brilliant poet you can trust. This book of course is based on the Oedipus which she spent years studying, Labdacus being Oedipus's father; & she uses that firm foundation for her own incredibly beautiful, brilliant, modern/classical writing. This is a book I return to more than almost any other. If you read it I hope it will feel so important to you, too.

A sad, beautiful meditation on fate, the power of music and poetry to express (even to call into being) the otherwise inexpressible, and the limits on the power of words ("the stunned silence at the heart of the text") and of the gods ("What are the gods, who can't repair such things?"). Schnackenberg somehow makes us forget about Freud, and refocuses our attention on the initial horror of Oedipus' story -- a child conceived in defiance of the oracle, then maimed and left on a hillside to die. Images, sounds and lines of text recur and modulate throughout the book, imitating lyrically the web of fate that binds both Apollo and the children of Labdacus. A stunning achievement!