Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg 1941–

Schaeffer is an American novelist, poet, and critic. (See also CLC, Vol. 6, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is that rarity: a fine novelist and poet. Where others pad slim and fragile volumes with material better kept from a candid world, this prolific author fills a 144-page book in which each poem exemplifies intelligence heightened and transmitted through vivid imagination, brilliant imagery, and remarkable formal integrity. How she can sustain such power, poem after poem, makes one marvel at her craft. Granite Lady comprises an immense range of subjects in an exceptional variety of treatments. She dramatizes growing up with fear, from the child's point-of-view; growing old and the state of senility; the quiet horrors of death, before and after the grave; the terrors of loss, impermanence, dislocation; natural disasters and psychic convulsions; and the miscellaneous griefs that callousness and neglect provoke. Her recurring theme is survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Her method: the odd perspective, the unexpected angle of vision, the hallucinatory fantasy, the fairy tale bent to sinister degrees. These poems force us to live the traumata of her characters' lives and often to relive our own.

Under the heading of "Glimmerings", a series of poems presents vignettes of childhood. Worlds but vaguely remembered by the adult spring instantly back from memory into life. In this uncharming nursery-tale atmosphere, the inanimate is always alive…. (pp. 239-40)

Other poems are deliberately confusing at first to convey the frightening aspects of the Brobdingnagian universe confronting the most sensitive young. In The Mother's Curses, the fears and insecurities are handed down through the generations, despite attempts to break the crippling pattern…. Another section, "Lightning Storm", turns to the marriage hearse. The highly original Spat describes blow by blow a quarrel using a fantastic jewelry-box metaphor. The Housewife finds herself in a frustrating replay of youth. Father is replaced by husband, and through an inversion and "shrinkage" her home has become like her girlhood dollhouse, only now the children "play with us / Like dolls." She asks: "Do others feel like this? Where do they go?" The First Madam, the enigmatic treatment of a Freudian case history in The Picture: Wolves in the Tree, and several of the other poems are beyond paraphrase, and probably outside mere rational consideration. But the words, even when meaning is ambiguous and obscure, still have an unsettling, evocative force…. [These] poems do so much at once, they won't be pinned down. Their complexity of motion, wild inversions, shifts in tone and emotional configuration, subtlety of nuance, and rich associative progressions must be experienced. They continue to give up new meanings, provoke different feelings with each re-reading.

In short, what I'm trying to say is: Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a poet. And Granite Lady is an extraordinary achievement. (p. 241)

Joseph Parisi, in Poetry (© by The Modern Poetry Association: reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), July, 1975.

[Alphabet for the Lost Years ] has two distinct parts although formally there are three sections in the volume. The first and more successful contains meditations on objects and emotions from the Arch to the Zzz of bees and sleepers. The focus on abstractions gives this alphabet an intellectual detachment that mutes the "cry of the human" heard in much contemporary poetry. No first-person pronouns here, and yet there is a mind at work and anguish, however disguised, in poems on Dementia, Hate, Jealousy…. The language is spare, the short lines grouped in couplets or triplets. But their control is balanced and occasionally upset by dependence on sound effects…. The second half...