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Title: Squares and Courtyards: Poems by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0-393-04830-6 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Sappho in Khaki
Comment: Embracing wholly contemporary matter in the idiomatic classicism perfected by her predecessor, W.H. Auden, Marily Hacker is so limber in her scansion, so poised in her shapings, that her four horsemen (cancer, AIDS, America as the lone superpower, the holocaust) trot along the pavement like drays pulling the farmer's wagon through Paris to les Halles.
She may be the first American in decades to take possession of Paris (with the possible exception of Paul Auster), not the postcard Paris of literary nostalgia, but the parks & apartments filled with the excluded, with addicts, with victims, with friends...the greys, the odors, the river all merge with the urban vision from her native New York city.
She confronts and subdues unwieldy themes which tempt others to propaganda or to shrillness. Ms. Hacker, instead, is laconic and empathetic, faintly ironic, in lines like "Death has a tendency to overdo/and life to border on the bathetic." She pots Jessie Helms very nicely in leaving him to anchor the end of a poem which is as traditional as any enemy of the NEA could care to read: "'Our' foreign policy chair's Jessie Helms..." Her delicate touch with epigram leaves the reader delighted: "the hegemonic televangelist..."
The ambiguity of being other in the opening poem of the collection, "The Boy"; her hymn to her sister-sufferers of breast cancer in "Invocation"; the delicate sapphics of "Broceliande"; the force and wholeness of "Days of 1994: Alexandrians (for Edmund White)" alone should earn her (though it would be hard to imagine her accepting it) the poet laureateship.
Best to conclude with the stanza from "Days of 1994" which clinches her reputation:
Four months (I say) I'll see her, see him again
(I dream my life, I wake to contingencies.)
Now I walk home along the river,
into the wind, as the clouds break open.
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Title: Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0393054187 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0393312259 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 1995 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Selected Poems: 1965-1990 by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0393313492 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979: Presentation Piece, Separations, Taking Notice by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 039332432X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001, New Edition by Adrienne Rich ISBN: 0393323951 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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