THE THRONE OF LABDACUS

Schnackenberg, a native of Tacoma, Washington, has received numerous awards. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals, and she has published three previous collections. The opus at hand is constructed as a single long poem consisting of unmetered, unrhymed couplets divided into ten sections, conceived, one assumes, to bear a stylistic resemblance to the epic poems of Homer. Despite these departures, the poem is surprisingly musical. Named for the grandfather of Oedipus, Schnackenberg’s epic presents the archetypal story from beyond “the rubble-gates of Thebes.” While the poet takes some liberties with the “facts” of the Oedipus tragedy, her account, for the most part, agrees with the classical sources—but in Schnackenberg’s version, the entire action of the Sophoclean drama has taken place offstage, and in another age. Her chronicle is a poem of internal dialogues, and it becomes a new translation, as it were, a retelling of an ancient fable in modern terms, a “folktale about a guiltless crime.” The poet’s stance is that of a post-Freudian: Oedipus is alive, but Freud is dead, and there is not, thankfully, a single oblique reference to the psychological concept he formulated. More than character, the poet’s concern is the ageless notion of fate, yet her position frequently seems to coincide with Heraclitus’s precept that one’s character is one’s fate. The time sequence, however, is quite jumbled, and it’s often difficult to establish whether the interpretation we’re overhearing belongs to the laconic Apollo, an omniscient narrator, or, literally, to the fly on the wall.

An ambitious work that does not always harmonize, but goes far in paraphrasing the ancient Greek concept of tragœdia for the modern reader who, finally, would agree with the disobedient servant’s simple pronouncement: “I rescued the child.”