Supernatural Love (Poems 1976-2000)

Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a major voice in American poetry. Supernatural Love shows the sensuous richness of her imaginatively daring poetry of ideas, and traces the evolution of this remarkable writer. Book by book, from an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates through the searching, dense, metaphysical imagery and cascading syntax which are her signature. From her classic portrait of Darwin in the last year of his life, to the vertiginous brilliance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, she produces poems as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion but never the same twice. With singular devotion, Schnackenberg writes as if poetry were a matter of life and death. Supernatural Love includes three collections previously published in Britain as well as The Throne of Labdacus, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. This new book-length poem telling the story of Oedipus is a visionary work of profound and tragic beauty. Her later book, Heavenly Questions, winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize, was published by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2011.