Names: Poems - Hardcover

Hacker, Marilyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393072185 ISBN 13: 9780393072181

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

“Hacker is, to use a trite term, a major poet. More than that she is exciting and true.”―George Szirtes

In Names, Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes glimpses of contemporary lives with dialogues undertaken in signal poetic voices. Using her signature wit, passion, and mastery of received and invented forms, she convinces us to believe in a world made possible by language―prescient, playful, polyglot, and often breathtaking.

from “Ghazal: The Beloved”:
Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved:
when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved?

Your every declaration is suspect.
That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved.

Were you merely a servant of the state
or (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved?

How pure you were, resistant in an orchard.
Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.

About this title

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen volumes of poems. Her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She lives in Paris.

Reviews

Hacker's virtuosic rhymes, syllabics and other traditional devices give discipline and elegance to her learned, yet direct, clear, personal, work: her daily life in Paris and New York, her affection for other writers, her lesbian identity and her left-wing politics find generous expression in this 12th book. Those who found her earlier work of the 1990s too casual could find real power here: reacting to violence in Iraq and in the Middle East, to America's sometimes baleful foreign policies, and contemplating the mortality of her friends, Hacker achieves a sometimes grim compression. “I tease out metaphors to link desire/ and stasis, coffee, shadows, lavender;/ in my name, sons and sisters die Elsewhere.� So she writes in an abbreviated crown of sonnets; a ghazal (one of 11, all composed according to strict older rules) rebukes the poet for “easy, dishonest verses./ Nothing protects your poetry from the love that kills.� Hacker has herself become an eminent translator (of Venus Khoury-Ghata and Claire Malroux, among many others); her attention to Francophone and Arabic writers, alongside and against her American Jewish heritage, helps give this collection its sometimes surprising force. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393072185
• ISBN 13: 9780393072181
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112