Names by Marilyn Hacker

From the Publisher

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.

Library Journal

Known as both a purveyor of poetic forms and an accomplished translator, Hacker (e.g., Assumptions) gives us varied offerings in this most recent volume. The book begins and ends with a ghazal, an Arabic form that includes rhyming couplets and a refrain. While she experiments here with a number of poetic forms, the ghazal appears throughout, with each occasion serving as a pillar of sorts, in the same way that columns in architecture help bear the weight of a building. Hacker, who divides her time between France and the United States, presents many pieces that address this interstitial mode of being. Derived from multiple origins, her poems deftly join the solidity of formal constraint with the unpredictable subjectivity of one whose life is lived at the point where cultures meet. VERDICT Reminiscent of the work of Richard Wilbur and Hayden Carruth, this new book will appeal to readers with a love of lyrical and elegant language.—Chris Pusateri, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, CO

Product Details