A Broken Window's Heart

...The poem's epigraph comes from the Talmud :"When a word is spoken in the name of the speaker, his lips move in the grave...

...She recalls that Dante's writings led to his banishment from his beloved Florence, and that he died of malarial fever in his marshy exile in Ravenna...

...Such endeavors would seem obnoxiously oracular, like the worst kind of science fiction or mystagogy, were they not also experiments in autobiographical exploration...

...Schnackenberg's soaring lines glint like the Byzantine temples' "hammered gold" splendor...

...In its opening threnody to her father, a professor of history at a Lutheran university, she fused memories of the Norwegian immigrant household she grew up in with meditations on subjects from his lectures—Luther, Wagner, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Hitler, the Norman Conquest of Saxon England as embroidered on the Bayeux tapestry...

...In his struggle against Stalin's determination to silence him, Mandelstam reworked the phrase into a defiant prediction, which Schnackenberg includes in her poem: "Now I'm dead in the grave, with my lips moving/ And every schoolboy repeating my words by heart...

...Tiberius Learns of the Resurrection" opens with the Emperor constructing "a mock-Rome, built with bird cages...

...The poem is the sublime result...

...The 39-year-old poet dauntlessly takes up cosmic themes: human creation versus the work of God, the impact myth has on real events, the relationship between love and art, the existence of evil...

...it is at once an homage to Dante and an attempt to sort out a personal crisis...

...Each puzzled, as she does, to understand human events in the light of a religious or occult cosmology...

...In "Soldier Asleep at the Tomb," litters of flamingo carcasses borne away by Roman legionnaires "As if they had done battle/With the sunset/Become a heap of murdered angels/Pitchforked from a horrifying height...

...When Virgil instructs his pupil to break off a branch, both words and blood flow from the torn bark, since only an injury can release their speech...

...Throughout her verse, particularly in its frequent symbolic parables, one finds evidence of the Lutheran penchant for early-Renaissance theological typography...

...Schnackenberg tells us that, when feeling too paralyzed to write, she read Dante...

...Image is layered upon image...

...Part One of this collection, the lengthy title poem "A Gilded Lapse of Time," similarly links philosophical and private concerns...

...Ultimately, though, "A Gilded Lapse of Time" is about regeneration...

...they yearn for their freedom, but fear liberation may come in a form more terrifying than their present oppression...

...She identifies this with her own inhibitions: "I kept to myself/Afraid that if I spoke, my tongue would touch those mutilated words, I was afraid/That if I spoke I would taste blood: Don't tear/The leaves off the trees of nonexistence...

...The violence and destruction that creation can bring about reverberate throughout the poem, like an echo bouncing off the domed vault of one of Ravenna's basilicas...

...Fictional situations and characters jostle historical incidents, rulers, painters, and writers...

...Even knowing that when you hear your name It's a soul on the other side who is grieving For you, though you're never told why...

...Besides the title work, the book contains two additional sections...

...Mosaics of Isaiah and Christ, high up in the apse of San Vitale, are reinterpreted as a parable of how the prophet's poetic evocation of "the suffering servant" was fulfilled by Jesus' suffering at the Crucifixion...

...Yet here, in the city where he wrote the Paradiso, she communes with his spirit, reopens herself to the salvific wounds of experience, and emerges inspired...

...Schnackenberg is indeed a rarity, a contemporary Christian writer who never sounds pietistic...

...Schnackenberg describes herself making a pilgrimage to Ravenna...

...Once more, the relationship between the forces of history and the inner drive of the artist is scrutinized, this time in an explicitly political context...

...Gazing beyond the chaste formalism of the Umbrian school, for example, she reveals a host of mystical figures as immersed in their allegorical activity as the creatures in a Hieronymus Bosch work...

...These poems are simultaneously a meditation on the rise and fall of Rome, a personal commentary on the Gospel stories, and a reflection on the implications of art...

...Next to his comprehensive genius, she muses, her poetry could never be "even a private script" in his margins...

...Early on, Schnackenberg refers to the cabalistic legend that, in forming the world, the vessels God was to use broke in his hands, thus bringing evil into existence...

...Dante's tour through the mountains of the afterlife, Yeats' mystical cruise to Byzantium, Eliot's voyage through "Time present and time past"—all are generated by deeply personal motives...

...What most blocks writers is the fear of causing pain to others as well as to themselves...

...Her verse on such familiar paintings as "The Dream of Constantine" or "Christ Dead" brings out details invisible to the literalist...

...Crux of Radiance" consists of a series of poems that continue her study of the problems inherent in artistic production...

...At the same time, they introduce Schnackenberg's own account of being silenced by writer's block...

...Inside, its avian citizens suffer the consequences of having transgressed the lex Romana: "the swallow was punished for spying," and "The pelican's beak was sawn off/For fishing a governor's pond without permission...

...Schnackenberg's eerie symbols dramatize her themes...

...Finding pain wherever she casts her eyes, Schnackenberg sees the Son of God looking down on his people, as if "through a broken window's heart...

...Gjertrud Schnackenberg's third collection, A Gilded Lapse of Time (Farrar Straus Giroux, 143 pp., $ 19.00) is the rare book able to meet this demanding standard...

...A beehive is pillaged by a seeker of honey...

...To paraphrase Blake, Schnackenberg sees through, not with, the eye...

...The Byzantine mosaics reinforce this: "A streak of blue perpetually flows,/ An upswelling crux of radiance in the grasses/That draws animals in search of healing...

...The startling images that light these pages of ten suggest the bizarre pictures medieval illuminators drew in the margins of their texts...

...The final third of the collection is devoted to another long work, "A Monument in Utopia...

...These lines are a free paraphrase of the first stanza of the Inferno, where the poet finds himself astray in a dark wood, confused and helpless...

...Although there are innumerable features to praise in A Gilded Lapse of Time—intellectual, esthetic and technical marvels—what impresses above all is Gjertrud Schnackenberg's compassionate depiction of human suffering and accomplishment...

...The dead there have become thorn trees...

...Stalin's Soviet Union, for instance, "a nightmare of the skull-piled wood," is transmogrified into "harmless Utopias" where poets, once destroyed by the State, are honored with bronze statues erected in public parks...

...Tongue-shaped laurel leaves, scattered in tribute to Dante at his tomb, remind her of the "wood of Suicides" from Canto XIII of the Inferno...

...It focuses on the Christian episodes rendered by such Renaissance artists as Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna, or retold in medieval legends...

...It celebrates one of poetry's 20th-century martyrs, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was persecuted by Stalin and finally killed in a labor camp...

...The religious themes of "Crux of Radiance" again are intertwined with personal experience, much like Yeats' conversations with the spirits of his occult visions, or James Merrill's Ouija pantheon...

...In the long run, he has turned out to be a better seer than the dictator...

...In the city of Ravenna, the Emperor Justinian, Dante and figures from the luminous mosaics there cross and recross one another's paths beneath the tessellated apses of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the Church of San Vitale...

...These include the need to make contact with a lost love, to combat spiritual stagnation and creative impotence, to allay the fear of old age, and, above all, to assert the worth of one's life and achievement...

...She is influenced equally by her poetic models, especially Dante, W.B...

...Yeats, T.S...

...Eliot, and the early (Catholic) Robert Lowell...

...In classical times, Ravenna was renowned for its beneficent underground springs, gushing forth at spots where goddesses were believed to have shed tears...

...Winged messengers and first-century despots serve to illustrate the haunted imagination of a downtrodden people (Israelites) in thrall to a superpower (Rome...

...The interplay of civilization and religion has obsessed Schnackenberg since her first book, Portraits and Elegies (1982...

...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...

...In "Annunciation," the archangel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary while, in the same neighborhood, Azrael, the angel of death, patrols from house to house, along streets occupied by foreign soldiers, and past the spot where King Herod is a beggar in the lane, And the handful of gravel he Offers with an averted face, In his outstretched palm, Was once Jerusalem...

...When love was driven back upon itself, When a lapse, where my life should have been, Opened like a breach in the wall, and I stood At a standstill before the gate built with mud, I thought my name was spoken and I couldn't reply...

...Truly, she looks "through a broken window's heart...

...the writing that results is breathtaking, unmistakable poetry...