SOURCE: McPhillips, Robert. “Reading the New Formalists.” Sewanee Review 97, no. 1 (winter 1989): 73-96.

In the following excerpt, McPhillips credits Schnackenberg for being one of the few contemporary poets with the proficiency to use traditional techniques, although he points out that she succeeds at this more in her first book than in The Lamplit Answer.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Portraits and Elegies (1982) and The Lamplit Answer (1985) have received considerable attention. Although the first collection was indebted to Robert Lowell, the human feeling underlying the book, combined with a mastery of meter and rhyme and a lyric sense of ordering sequences, made it a poised and distinguished debut. The source of its inspiration is memory. This concern is rooted in the poet's love for her father, a professor of history, whose death generates the volume's opening sequence of elegies, “Laughing with One Eye.” It also haunts the volume's other two sections. The first...