St. Matthew Passion
St. Matthew Passion
St. Matthew Passion
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Description
Description
From one of the most lauded poets of her generation comes a major new work. Winner of the International Griffin Prize, the Rome Prize, the LA Times Book Prize, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, among many other awards, Gjertrud Schnackenberg has always put her technical mastery at the service of a sublime vision. In St. Matthew Passion, the poet recounts a speaker's experience of listening to Bach's masterwork and discovering in it a portal to another world, shimmering with mystery. The poet takes the reader with her, crossing over into the music: I need a heart of bronze for hearing this, / And not the lost wax melting off / Beneath a molten pour of sound / When, out of love, / A solo flute appears. The result is a thrilling chef d'oeuvre deserving of a place alongside Eliot's Ash Wednesday.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
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
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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