SOURCE: Davis, Christina. Review of Supernatural Love and The Throne of Labdacus, by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Boston Review 26, no. 3 (summer 2001): 27.

In the following review, Davis finds Schnackenberg broadening her talents with each additional work.

Poetry remains an art of elders, by which I do not mean a bourgeois art of old men in dry months, but an art that—unlike the youth culture around it and the pervasive cultural Alzheimer's—still values the slow accretion of wisdom across a career, the ripening, as Rilke once wrote, in the blood. The publication of Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992 and The Throne of Labdacus allows us to consider her distinctive trajectory, one that is punctuated not by the stylistic newness of fad or by the superficial novelty of elliptical ploys, but by a newness that reveals itself through content, through the scrupulousness of the ideas. And these ideas, confronted and...