Gjertrud Schnackenberg's first three books reveal a mastery of formal verse forms. Her debut chapbook, Portraits and Elegies (1982), won exceptional critical acclaim and stimulated the appetite of Americans hungry for a major new voice. A poetic triptych including formal poems of great power, Portraits and Elegies departed from the literary fashion of the 1980s in its historical subjects and reliance upon meter and rhyme instead of the free-verse confessional poem. However, far from revisiting the aesthete, sometimes sterile, dry academicism of the 1950s, Schnackenberg used verse forms as a whetstone to hone her own distinct voice. Her poems, dense and musical, echo traditions inherited from British poetry and early Modernists such as T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens in their concern not only with history but also with philosophy, classicism, Christianity, and metaphysics. An artistic versifier, Schnackenberg can write in flawless meter, shifting from Stevensian...