Squares and Courtyards: Poems - Softcover

Hacker, Marilyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393320952 ISBN 13: 9780393320954

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Synopsis

"[Poems] of intense intimacy, beauty, and authority." ―W. S. Merwin

Moving back and forth with the rhythm of the writer’s life, from Paris to New York, from the 1990s to the 1940s, Squares and Courtyards reminds us that, to take action, it is necessary to take notice.

About this title

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her collection Winter Numbers received a Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Paris, France.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0393320952
• ISBN 13: 9780393320954
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 108