Squares and Courtyards: Poems - Hardcover

Hacker, Marilyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048306 ISBN 13: 9780393048308

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Synopsis

A ninth anthology of poetry by a winner of the National Book Award, Lenore Marshall Prize and Poets' Prize celebrates the diverse passages of life, along with the community of friends, the courage of those living with terminal illness, and the mysteries of life and death.

About this title

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker lives in New York City and Paris. She teaches English at Hofstra University. She is the author of eight other books of poems, including Winter Numbers, Selected Poems: 1965-1990, and Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons.

Reviews

Dailiness and disease fuel the award-winning Hacker's ninth collection of poetry: a grim, painstaking survey of the effects of cancer and HIV on the author's wide circle of loved ones. Hacker conveys a strength of will with an evenness of tone, one that can handle difficult material while offsetting some of the more telegraphed formalism. She is at her strongest when most stark and direct, as in "Twelfth Floor West": "The new bruise on/ her thigh was baffling. They left an armchair/ facing the window: an unspoken goal." The book is separated into two sections, the longer of which, "Scars on Paper," contains 19 shorter poems that harbor some heavy-handed imagery ("She herself/ was now a box of ashes on a shelf/ whose sixteen-year-old-shadow mugged at you/ next to a Beatles poster in your blue/ disheveled bedroom...") and lines that often read like prose broken into triplets, quatrains and unnumbered short sonnet sequences. In the 40-page "Paragraphs from a Daybook," however, Hacker drops her formal guard and finds the emotional pitch and range that most affectingly serve her primary subjects: courage and dignity manifested through ordinary behavior in the face of acute physical breakdown, suffering and societal disdain (several passages take on anti-Semitism)--and searing self-examination: "However well I speak, I have an accent/ tagging my origins: that Teflon fist,/ that hog wallow of investment/ that hegemonic televangelist's/ zeal to dumb the world down to its virulent/ cartoon contours." Readers will find many of the contours here precise and elegant. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

National Book Award^-winner Hacker's ninth collection is a book of midlife. Poem after poem mentions the death of a loved elder, a valued contemporary, or a haphazardly killed youngster. But these aren't keening elegies or somberly resigned memento mori. Hacker is too engaged in living to indulge grief with the youthful passion her daughter shows for a suddenly dead friend or to senescently reminisce and fade away. She is highly observant of how she and her peers react to the crises death imposes on them. Those reactions are vigorous, including such things as helping AIDS and cancer sufferers as well as continuing to appreciate daily realities in Hacker's two cities of residence, New York and Paris. That appreciation culminates in the sequence, "Paragraphs from a Daybook," that concludes the book in a journal-keeping mode. Here, at last, Hacker recalls her past, without a trace of mourning. It is hard to imagine the poetry reader in midlife who won't identify and revel in these poised, intelligently lively, honorably serious poems. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0393048306
• ISBN 13: 9780393048308
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 107