- Paperback: 112 pages
- Publisher: WW Norton; New edition edition (Feb 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393320952
- ISBN-13: 978-0393320954
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.7 x 1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 163 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,270,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
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
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sappho in Khaki,
By "jeanne_gris" (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Squares And Courtyards Poems (Hardcover)
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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4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sappho in Khaki,
By "jeanne_gris" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Squares And Courtyards Poems (Hardcover)
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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful but not happy.,
By T. Rehfeldt "Amateur Classic Scholar" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Squares And Courtyards Poems (Paperback)
Marilyn Hacker writes poetry beautifully. She also writes beautiful poetry. This collection exhibits both of these traits. Her poems are always sensitive, perceptive, and moving. These are all of the above; especially deeply moving. But be warned, these are not happy poems. She touches on death, desease, and grief. She describes loss and apprehension of loss. If you are looking for a sympathetic voice who has been through all of these emotions and survived; or if you are looking for help in coping yourself, then read these carefully. If you want to be uplifted choose one of her other collections.
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