Gjertrud Schnackenberg, with the publication of her first chapbook, Portraits and Elegies (1982), established her reputation as a poet. Hers was one of the most notable and enthusiastically received debuts by a young American poet in the 1980s. The most memorable poems in the collection are found in its opening sequence, "Laughing with One Eye," a series of elegies written in 1977 in memory of her father, Walter Charles Schnackenberg, a professor who died in 1973. Poems on her shared past with her father and her profound feeling of loss after his death remain the thematic core of her work. In Portraits and Elegies the graceful, formal style is often enhanced by rhymed quatrains (though her rhymed and metered verse paragraphs sometimes extend as long as twenty-four lines), and their quiet musical and linguistic fluency distinguish Schnackenberg's autobiographical lyrics from the shrillness of emotion and the harsh cadences of Sylvia Plath...