BOOK

A Gilded Lapse of Time

by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Farrar Straus Giroux, $19.00

Gjertrud Schnackenberg's third book, A Gilded Lapse of Time, is that rare phenomenon: a volume of poetry with universal appeal. Poetry critics will be attracted by its profound and intricate layers of meaning, and the language is beautiful enough to lure those who don't know the difference between Frost and Blake.

Admittedly, A Gilded Lapse of Time does have its faults--Schnackenberg tends to run on in a poetic stream of consciousness, sometimes at the expense of coherence. It's easy to get lost in the flow of language. The attractive thing about this book is that getting lost is not such a bad thing--Schnackenberg's words sing with a lyric beauty independent of underlying meaning.

Yet there is meaning to be found in this volume, for those who take the time to look. Through her powerful, surprisingly mature poetry, the 39-year-old Schnackenberg has crafted a testimonial to the history and spirit of humankind which stands as both a tribute and a lament.

Although these poems deal with the past, Schnackenberg is not writing about distant textbook history--instead, she probes the connections between the past and the present. For Schnackenberg, poetry itself links the two.

The title sequence of the book takes the reader through a tour of Dante's tomb. Schnackenberg's meditation on the poet becomes a lament for the loss of a great poetic tradition. The speaker grieves that "no one will ever bother to cast again" the stunning images he created. The tone becomes less pessimistic as Schnackenberg begins to blur the lines between past and present: "There is a flood remnant...As if the Samaritan woman's water jar/Had been hurled against the wall, and was still dripping...Or it may be only a freshly washed floor/ Whose little lakes are...swept around by the custodian's mop...They say the ice-cold well of martyrdom brims into the present here."

As Schnackenberg moves effortlessly through what she calls "a gilded lapse of time," the symbiotic relationship between history and poetry becomes more apparent. Describing a picture of the prophet Isaiah in Dante's tomb, Schnackenberg writes, "He gazes down from the heights of his poetry...as if his poetry had not drive/ Jesus along the muddy path."

Schnackenberg introduces various motifs in this first sequence, most notably water and gilt. In these poems water seems to flow back and froth in time, providing a sense of continuity between past and present. Schnackenberg often uses "gilt" or "gilded" to describe the setting of her poetry, or the poetry itself--something beautiful, untouchable, frozen at a particular moment in time. "Gilt" and "guilt" are used in conjunction or even interchangeably. In Schnackenberg's view, poetry is not just a gilded snapshot of an instant in time; it is also somewhat responsible for--guilty of--the unfolding of history.

The second sequence, "Crux of Radiance," continues to develop the religious overtone of the book, grappling with the Judeo-Christian tradition and the image of God in poetry. Alternately sorrowful and biting, Schnackenberg derides a modern society that has lost touch with its historic roots. Ancient ruins figure prominently in this sequence, symbols of an artistic and spiritual splendor that once existed and has now been abandoned and forgotten. Poetry is described as "a gold thread...you feel your way along" in the search for memory.

Schnackenberg exhorts us to value that golden thread: "But really you must admit/You're lost/ But really you must not lose the way," she writes of the human condition. This can refer to losing the "way" of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the poem suggests a further, broader meaning: by losing the connection of poetry to history, we lose a vital way of understanding our past.

The third sequence, "A monument in Utopia," draws a parallel between the death of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at the hands of Stalin and the death of poetry itself in a cynical society. Primarily concerned with images of death and destruction, the third sequence also holds out a ray of hope for resurrection, a rebirth of faith and idealism. By the end of the third sequence, Schnackenberg encapsulates the whole pageant of human history in a few line:

The roses' silence unbroken...