626 The American Century: Literature since 1945background in classical Greek; that, with her larger interest in Greek history and
culture, has profoundly influenced her work. Incorporating her experiences as a
teacher, a transmitter of knowledge, into many of the poems in Pass It On (1989),
she considers issues of family and mortality, metamorphosis and rebirth. A poems
like “Teaching Emily Dickinson,” for instance, considers her students’ reactions to
the New England poet. “She sings the pain of loneliness for one /,” Hadas reflects,
“Another sees a life of wasted youth.” Poetry and death are often intertwined in
Hadas’s urbane lines. Her elegies intimate that the emptiness, the oblivion of death
can somehow be alleviated by language. So, in “Literary Executor” (195), Hadas
suggests that death has “no closure” and that poetry, a continually “unfinished
business,” nurtures rebirth and renewal. And in “Fleshly Answers” (1998), she
discovers miracles and the possibility of transformation in ordinary, everyday
experiences, and our speaking of those experiences. “We are passing through the
world, /” she says, “This is some of what it does to us.” The poetry of Schnackenberg
is, if anything, even more allusive, still more soaked in intertextual reference than
that of Hadas. Her work is inhabited by such illustrious cultural figures as Dante,
Piero della Francesca, and Osip Mandelstam. Formally, her early writing was
characterized by the use of hymn meter; this was replaced in A Gilded Lapse of Time
(1992) by terza rima. Intellectually and emotionally all her poetry, earlier and later,
is characterized by a concern with history, grief, and writing. The presence of
Schnackenberg’s father, a professor of history, is strongly felt in her first two
collections, Portraits and Elegies (1982) and The Lamplit Answer (1985). Equally
present there is the sense that history is indelibly connected to writing and that both
can somehow help us to overcome the tragic aspects of mortality. “It isn’t history if
it isn’t written – /,” as she puts it in “Imaginary Prisons” (1985), “It’s written here,
and written here in memory.” The later collection, A Gilded Lapse of Time, addresses
in turn Dante, the suffering of Christ as depicted in Renaissance and Byzantine
paintings, and the suffering of Mandelstam in a Stalinist labor camp. While a still
later one, The Throne of Labdacus (2000), offers an extended meditation on the fate
of Oedipus. The connection between the figures that populate these more recent
volumes also links them with the earlier work. What Schnackenberg is preoccupied
with, consistently, is family, ancestry, both personal and poetic, and the meaning and
implications of art. Her concern is to locate herself, to establish her lineage, her
relation both formally and emotionally to her many antecedents.
Two important figures in the New Narrative branch of New Formalism are Mark
Jarman (1952–) and Robert McDowell (1953–), the co-founders in 1980 of an
influential journal dedicated to reviving narrative poetry, the Reaper. Jarman’s early
work, in North Sea (1978), is lyrical, but by the time of his 1985 collection, Far and
Away, he was concentrating on lengthier narrative forms. Many of his poems
circulate around the possibility, and the difficulty, of faith. God is mostly silent in
these works, but Jarman struggles nevertheless to articulate a form of belief that is as
unorthodox as it is hard won. So, in Unholy Sonnets (2000), he describes the absent
presence of the divine in the first moments of an air crash. “Someone is always
praying as the plane / Breaks up,” Jarman suggests; and, as the passengers fall fromGGray_c05.indd 626ray_c 05 .indd 626 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM