'Heavenly Questions': Lullabies for the dying

By Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Farrar Straus Giroux.

64 pp. $23

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Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Ingenious repetition is what shapes Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions, an intensely moving elegy in six parts.

The first and fourth poems, for instance, are lullabies, though not songs for one newly born, but rather for one about to die. "Archimedes Lullaby," the first, begins:

A visit to the shores of lullabies,

Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,

Is seated in his half-filled universe

And sorting out the grains by shape and size.

Above his head a water-ceiling sways . . .

The fourth poem, "Fusiturricula Lullaby," begins:

A visit to the shores of lullabies,

So far from here, so very far away,

A floor of sand, it doesn't matter where,

And overhead a water-ceiling sways . . .

Lines appear again and again, like leitmotifs, and then reappear in combination. So "hush now, all is well now, close your eyes" and "all that could be done has now been done" - both of which recur throughout the book - later tellingly combine:

Footsteps, a curtain swept aside, a nurse,

A wave of reassurances: he's fine;

What needed tending to was tended to,

And all that could be done has now been done,

And all is well and nothing left to do.

All is well and hush and never mind.

Those lines are from "Sublimaze," the second of the six poems, and the linchpin of the suite. Sublimaze is a brand name for fentanyl, an opioid analgesic used to treat chronic breakthrough pain (so-called because it "breaks through" the relief provided by whatever other painkiller the patient has been administered; it is commonin treatment of cancer patients). On Jan. 23, 2002, Schnackenberg's husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, died of stomach cancer:

His eyes seized mine,

He summoned all his strength to move his gaze

To look out at the night, a final time.

The night of January twenty-third.

Never again the moon in heaven above . . .

The book's title is a reference to the Tien Wen, a series of poems by China's earliest great poet, Qu Yuan. These poems - more than 170 of them, posing questions about the nature of being and the universe - were said to have been written on the walls of the shrines of ancient kings and in the halls of nobles. Walls figure over and over in Schnackenberg's poems, and in "Sublimaze" she paraphrases Qu Yuan's interrogations:

Unbidden universe, what summons us,

Awakening, unbidden, in its midst?

Unpremeditated, and unsought,

A deed without a doer doing this,

An act without a "pre-existing I";

Self-fabricating atoms, like a thought

That pre-exists the mind where it appears:

Why this - i.e., existence - why exist?

The universe is self-created where?

The universe is self-created why?

Schnackenberg employs a wondrously supple blank verse freely laced with rhyme. It makes for a steady, soft music, altogether appropriate for lullabies, yet never monotonous. The dynamic rarely even approaches forte, and this softness often makes the lines more harrowing:

A pinpoint leak of blood that can't be traced.

A mass embedded underneath the heart.

Hepatic portal vein that routes the blood

Throughout the tract of the intestine maze

And soaks the liver's capillary beds.

The intima. A bleeding deep inside.

Something smaller than a grain of sand.

One thing these poems make painfully clear is how utterly alone we are in grief for those we love:

I stood instinctively to hear the call.

The resident physician, feeling for

The artery. A witness from the staff.

Whispered consolation. Four-fifteen.

The time and date and cause recorded, signed.

I swayed, dead on my feet, among the living,

Then stood away, unbidden. Still his wife,

But couldn't draw one breath on his behalf.

Nor add a single heartbeat to his life.

Heavenly Questions is sure to be regarded as one of the great elegies in the language, not because it mourns a death, but rather because it is such a testament to love. If you read only one book of poetry this year, read this one. And if you're not inclined to read poetry, make an exception in this case.