Squares and Courtyards: Poems

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.

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.