Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002

I'm glad there are some blank pages in the back of this book because it gives me a place to jot notes. What's happened around this book since it's publication-silence-(i.e. so few reviews) is part and partial/symptomatic of what the poet decries in her first poem-a prologue to the rest of the book-as the "abandoned dissident discourse" brought on by "leaden words like `Homeland.'" Are reviewers too lazy, too busy, too afraid to take on the challenges a book like this puts forth? This book asks that we do our homework or that we be as well read, as engaged in the real world of current and past politics and policies as the author is. The book calls for each reader to write his/her own reader's guide (much as Hacker's earlier poem "Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found" demanded: "Make your own footnotes; it will do you good.")Hacker's aim, in part, is to make us aware of the people, the public people, who populate her text, people such as June Jordon, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Neruda, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Hayden Carruth, all of them politically engaged poets who considered themselves charged, as poets, with the duty to speak out against the ills of the world around them. As Hacker does.Poetry is for an elite few! Poof! This poetry is available to anyone who takes the time to read it-to shut off CNN, "Friends" and FOX News and delight in the sounds that cascade and roll over us and give us what the best poetry has forever: delight to the ear because of its musical/verbal genius, its use of assonance, consonance, rhyme of every kind, alliteration. The poems deliver the kind of pleasure successfully completing a jigsaw puzzle does and at the same time hit home with their portrayal of human experiences that most of us have lived through: the loss of a loved one to cancer, the experience of being jilted by a lover, the fear of death, the fear of life as we know it today in the "homeland." Read it and think. Read it and look up the proper names. Read it and weep. Read it and carry on.

Though Desesperanto is rather challenging (with every other poem requiring the use of either a French-English dictionary or Google), Marilyn Hacker's use of everyday places and real scenarios draws the reader into her world. Before finishing some poems, such as "On the Stairway", one is almost forced to look up certain things (in this case, Violette Leduc). Desesperanto is not just an interactive history lesson. The book serves as Hacker's stepping-stone toward opening the readers' eyes to the lives of writers-- from quests for equality to the perfect little restaurant. Muriel Rukeyser to June Jordan to Violette Leduc, Desesperanto is a wake-up call for every writer, and reader, as to how a poet is as a person, not just as a figurehead.

The pages of Marilyn Hacker's Desesperanto are filled with stunning language and refreshing, original rhythm that convey a sense of realness that any reader can relate to. Hacker shares her personal experiences she has endured with friends and family by taking us on a reminiscent journey full of allusions. Her words, both French and English, give the book depth and creates many layers for the reader to interpret and connect with, both young and old. Desesperanto leaves the reader with the feeling that hope can be obtained through despair.

Marilyn Hacker's poetic structure may be impeccably formal, but the subtlety and grace of her rhyme, meter and other paradigmatic schemes stunningly enhance, rather than contrast with, the emotional intimacy of the poems in her twelfth and newest volume, Desesperanto (2003). Like Hacker's earlier collections, Desesperanto addresses the political-"Embittered Elegy," for example, concerns the murders of hate-crime victim Matthew Shepard and pro-choice practitioner Dr. Barnett Slepian-but the quotidian familiarity of the poet's language and the moments she portrays (the "Bronx-bound local. . .rumbling up the tracks"; a mother passing a soccer ball back and forth with her two young children) define each poem as an individual snapshot of personal meditation. Readers should pay particular attention to the "sonnet-portraits" of Paris in the book's second section ("Itinerants"). Though unflinching in the unsentimentality and often dark accuracy of their vision, they nevertheless inspire a certain nostalgia for the city where the "rue de Bretagne leads past the Square/du Temple." In short, Hacker's voice is less that of the poet speaking to her (mostly) anonymous readers than that of all humanity expressing the core of its experience.

The emotional urgency, complexity and freshness of Marilyn Hacker's poems in her most recent collection DESESPERANTO (2003), work seamlessly and forcefully with their formal mastery and prosodic inventiveness. The originality of her rhyme and the pressure she places on her meter reinvigorate fixed forms to create a unique counterpoint with her poems' emotional power and the daring of their subject matter. The result is work that is always poignant, reflective, energetic and generous in its good-natured and unfaltering humanity by one of America's most important poets of social conscience, of the body and the body politic. This poetry allows us to enter the tonal range of the poet's griefs, joys and her meditative quandaries into the nature of these so that we may learn from her how we might have the courage to enter our own. Hacker, as always, opens new doors widely, showing us that to be socially engaged and personal, erudite and playful, intellectual and raw, a witness to the largest issues of our time and an incisive observer of the daily, passionate and inclusively human, while reworking form to make it her own, give rise to poetry that is among the most potent and necessary being written in English today. In her "Elegy to a Soldier," a sequence dedicated to the memory of poet/writer/scholar/activist June Jordan, Hacker weaves together the everyday details of a life intensely lived along with her own and Jordan's deeply metaphysical and political consciousness. The rawness of real life is savored and celebrated while also seen into and connected with a vision that burns through surfaces. Hacker writes, "Now your death, as if it were 'yours': your house, your / dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. / Death's not 'yours,' what's yours are a thousand poems / alive on paper..." Marilyn Hacker's work is a guidebook that leads us into and through ourselves, singing to us with prayerful attention that we must live as fully as possible each day of our lives no matter what, that the acceptance and melding of hope and despair together, create a light that illuminates what is needed for a just world of endless possibility