Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 - Softcover

Hacker, Marilyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393326306 ISBN 13: 9780393326307

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor.

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir, meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto, then, is a universal language of despair ―despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393326306
• ISBN 13: 9780393326307
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124