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.

About the Author
Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington. Her retrospective Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001) includes her four collections, Portraits and Elegies (1982), The Lamplit Answer (1985), A Gilded Lapse of Time (1995), and The Throne of Labdacus (2000), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her latest collection is Heavenly Questions, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, published in hardback in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010 and by Bloodaxe in paperback in 2011. She has won many literary awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rome Prize for Literature, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy for Arts and Letters. She has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. She divides her time between Tacoma and Boston, Massachusetts.

Reviews
Poems that move me in a way that I don't really think I have experienced since I first read Rilke at 16 or 17. What a superb poet she is, and what a range of original sensibility, what private music, in the less well-worn emotions. -- Nadine Gordimer
'I've just discovered a wonderful American poet called Gjertrud Schnackenberg - she really is called that - and I wish I had the time to catch up with everything she's done. I think she's brilliant.' - Clive James, speaking on BBC Two's Front Row Late: When Mary Beard met Clive James, December 2018 'Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 teems with thought-packed things, and thing-packed thoughts' - Clive James, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year, 2018) -- Clive James
Schnackenberg has turned her erudition, technical mastery and objectivity to extraordinary account, and has set wide new sights for poets of her generation. She has cracked open the lyric of personal anecdote and set it in the light of history. -- Rosanna Warren * The New Republic *



Book Information
ISBN 9781852245610
Author Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 545g