SOURCE: Kirsch, Adam. “All Eyes on the Snow Globe.” New York Times Book Review (29 October 2000): 27.

In the following essay, Kirsch focuses on Schnackenberg's ideas regarding fate and her tendency to view her subjects from a great height.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg stands out among younger American poets for her ambition, in the best sense of the word. Her verse is strong, dense and musical, anchored in the pentameter even when it veers into irregularity, behind it are formidable masters. Robert Lowell most notably, but also Yeats and Auden. Lowellian, too, is her desire to treat history as something more than a stage setting, to make it the medium of thought and feeling. Her new book, The Throne of Labdacus, is a long meditation on ancient Greece and the Oedipus myth; in her earlier work, collected in Supernatural Love, she is drawn to Chopin's Paris and colonial New England. These are...