The God of Writers Broke His Pen

It is a truism to say that our culture is both unable and unwilling to cope with death. Divorced from religion and the saving myths of art, delivered to a medical empiricism ever more miraculous but ever more insistent, and brought up close with the end of things, we find there is nothing to contemplate but the grim facts. Nor do we look for greatness any longer in poetic elegy, though it has yielded some of the landmarks in our literature. The genre is made even more inaccessible by its contradictory demands, for an elegy must be driven by anger but be capable of tenderness; it must allow for the obsessiveness of its own grief but also be informed by a more universal intelligence, if it is not to induce in the reader a certain emotional boredom. Gjertrud Schnackenberg's new book, Heavenly Questions, a set of six linked long poems inspired (the word must be carefully considered, in this context) by the illness and death of her husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, achieves this conflicted balance. It is perhaps the most powerful elegy written in English by any poet in recent memory, and it is a triumphant consummation of Schnackenberg's own work. In it, a poet of wide learning and traditional poetic form has been hurt into outraged and incandescent song.