The Throne of Labdacus

Rating:
Summary: Stunning!
Review: A sad, beautiful meditation on fate, the power of music and poetry to express (even to call into being) the otherwise inexpressible, and the limits on the power of words ("the stunned silence at the heart of the text") and of the gods ("What are the gods, who can't repair such things?"). Schnackenberg somehow makes us forget about Freud, and refocuses our attention on the initial horror of Oedipus' story -- a child conceived in defiance of the oracle, then maimed and left on a hillside to die. Images, sounds and lines of text recur and modulate throughout the book, imitating lyrically the web of fate that binds both Apollo and the children of Labdacus. A stunning achievement!

Rating:
Summary: glistening new formalism
Review: Her writing in this book is elegant, elegiac modern formalism. She's such a marvelous poet. Reading this book, every word & every syllable feel so perfect. She's a very careful, brilliant poet you can trust. This book of course is based on the Oedipus which she spent years studying, Labdacus being Oedipus's father; & she uses that firm foundation for her own incredibly beautiful, brilliant, modern/classical writing. This is a book I return to more than almost any other. If you read it I hope it will feel so important to you, too.

Rating:
Summary: Not the Right Throne
Review: This is a weak book from a poet who has done better and should know better. Schnackenberg manages to avoid everything, or almost everything, that is compelling about the Oedipus myth. There is one section, on the metaphoric origins of the Greek alphabet, that is fascinating (in a wholly fantastic sort of way), but the rest of the poem is as dead as the language Schnackenberg is talking about. This is a poet who has moved, in a relatively short time, from writing memorable poems (many of them in traditional forms) to poems that only antiquarians will remember. I thought A Gilded Lapse of Time, the poet's last book, was a fairly significant lapse, but this one goes even further. This is poetry written with an eye toward a MacArthur. The review in the New York Review of Books was a travesty, in my opinion. Caveat emptor.