This eagerly awaited book, by a young, gifted poet, is not quite all it was hoped it would be. No doubt expectations were too high to begin with. Thirty-three-year-old Gjertrud Schnackenberg has already received many major prizes in her short career as a poet, and her first book—chapbook, really —entitled Portraits and Elegies (1982), was widely praised. All this may have led us to believe, quite unfairly, that this would be a faultless book. Unfortunately, it isn’t. There are some wonderful things here. But the author has chosen to include, among the many formal poems that are her real distinction, a small group of rather lackluster confessional works. No doubt Schnackenberg hoped these poems would inject a personal element into what she may have felt was a decidedly impersonal collection. Whatever her intention, these poems largely fail, not because they are confessional, but because they are quite simply inferior in quality. Some of them, addressed to an absent lover, could be the ordinary scribbles of any love-struck undergraduate. They almost capsize the book.

They don’t, fortunately. The reason is that the greater part of The Lamplit Answeris devoted to poems of a different sort, best typified by the volume’s long opening poem, the extraordinary “Kremlin of Smoke.” Schnackenberg is at her best spinning elaborate, imaginative webs around ideas, stories, and historical figures. This talent is nowhere better displayed than in this poem. Her subject is Chopin, his childhood in Warsaw and his days as the bright young