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Entity shares the poetry of grief from Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

Her name isn’t as weird as you think it is: it’s German.

And her poetry isn’t as obscure as it seems on the surface:

“And in the aperture, the remnants of
Heavenly Question, lightly brushed across
With opalescent ore of consciousness:
     The universe is where? Is hanging where?”

Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s latest collection of poems, Heavenly Questions, roams across time and space – all the way back to ancient Greece and down to the bottom of the ocean – to explore the depths of something fundamentally human: the experience of loss.

Schnackenberg is a poet who teaches us why we need poetry: after her husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, died in 2002, she created a watery world of poems to express her grief.

At first, Schnackenberg’s poetry was intimidating even to this English major; her oceanic images were stunning – almost hypnotizing, in fact – but it was also easy to get lost in the sea of wordplay in her poems.

But then, amid all the pretty words, came a startling, desperate cry, evidence of the search for meaning in a mad world that is at the core of poetry. After cherishing the last moments of her husband’s life down to the last detail, “The red-lit aureate curving of his ear, / Warm-blooded velvet, made for lips to find,” she finds that she has no words for her husband’s death: “Here the god of writers broke his pen.”

There are no words for Schnackenberg’s grief. And that’s exactly what makes her poetry so powerful.

Here’s what the judge of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize had to say about its winning collection: “Reading this book is like reading the ocean, its swells and furrows, its secrets fleetingly revealed and then blown away in gusts of foam and spray or folded back into nothing but water. Heavenly Questions demands that we come face to face with matters of mortal importance, and it does so in a wildly original music that is passionate, transporting, and heart-rending.”

At the end of Heavenly Questions, Schnackenberg and her readers can find comfort in the rocking rhythm of her words:

“And close your eyes now, hush now, all is well,
And far from here, so very far away,

A wave sets down an empty spiral shell
And draws away, it doesn’t matter where,
Among the other waves that come and go,
And other waves appear and disappear
And hush now, all is well, and far from here

All heaven and earth appear; and evanesce;
A self-engulfing spiral, ridge by ridge,
That disappears in waves that come and go
And all that could be done is done; and seven;
And six; and five; and four; and three; and two;
And one – and disappearing – far away –
Enraptured to the end, and all in play,
A spiral slowly turns itself in heaven.”

Schnackenberg’s bravery in shouting her Heavenly Questions to the world proves that grief is not to be hidden; there is grandeur and glory in crying out across the impassable ocean of loss.

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