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This critically acclaimed sonnet sequence is the passionately intense story of a love affair between two women, from the electricity of their first acquaintance to the experience of their parting.
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Customer Reviews (5)

A Compelling Love Story
Marilyn Hacker's volume, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, is a sumptuous sonnet cycle that some have called a verse-novel.Rather than a novel, though, the volume is more a memoir.The collection does tell a story - an intense, emotional story of a year-long lesbian love affair.The title of the work is a fitting pun:while Hacker's relationship cycles the seasons, it is, nevertheless, a May-December romance.Some seventeen years separate the lovers.From the beginning, Hacker and her lover, Rachel, sizzle, and Hacker writes bluntly, and explicitly, of the thrill of attraction, the fervor of love at first blush, the passion, and possibility, of fantasy.And, the satisfaction of satisfaction.Lust soon turns to love, and Hacker finds herself in an unaccustomed position - that of needing someone.While in the heat of the relationship, the age disparity does not seem an issue; in the end, though, it becomes clear that maturity matters and that Hacker has much more invested in the relationship than does Rachel.

Like a voyeur, Hacker's reader peeks, not only into Hacker's bedroom, but also into Hacker's life.It is the quotidian (one of Hacker's favorite words) moments that are most poignant.Here, Hacker writes of home, of her daughter - Iva, of her travels.Undergirding all, however, is her relationship with Rachel.When the two are separated, and this happens often with Hacker frequently in Italy or France, the verse resonates with longing for Rachel.The distance between the two is palpable in these lines, and Hacker achieves this by peppering her verse with allusions to foreign locales and by writing phrases in Italian or French.The reader, like Hacker, eagerly awaits the reunion of the two.

Then, the poetry comes to a heartrending, staggering end.It is over, just like the love affair. And the reader undoubtedly feels the same punch to the gut that Hacker does, especially when she helplessly wonders, "will one year bracket us from start to finish?"

All of this - the plain yet elegant language, the interconnected sonnets, the various villanelles, the heartbreaking symmetry - creates a compelling love story.

A Masterpiece of Desire and Sex, Love and Loss
Sophistocated and exact, Marilyn Hacker is a poet's poet. She is a formalist who still believs in the power of sonnets, a writer of astounding intellect and superb taste who, like Wallace Stevens, gives you the feeling she's intensely alive even in contemplation. This book, with the poems all set in New York, is a tour de force of modern poetry: a novel in sonnets, each sonnet connecting to the one before it and to the one that follows. It recounts the stormy love affair between the poet and her wayward muse, a much younger woman. The language is gorgeous. The story is romantic, gritty and quotidian, all in the right places. The details fix you in place and time: upscale New York life, late 20th century. These poems take you through the full range of emotion, but mostly they're very, very sexy. The subject may be lesbian love but no lover can fail to identify with the joy and ache and longing--and yes, even with the sex. A perfect Valentine's Day gift. A total masterpiece.

Life-Changing, Sexy, Alive...
A pregnant pause between word three and four of one of these sonnets changed my life.Hacker writes an accessible, witty, beautiful, tender, sexy masterpiece (a novel, really) which has become, since its pub date, afolk rite-of-passage for many readers (even non-poetry lovers), apole-raising standard for other poets, and the source for many phrasesworth remembering: from "age is not the muddle of the matter" tothe rhyming of "fit of pique" with "geste heroique."This is a page-turning classic -- erudite, lyrical, and peopled by womenone would want to know.A smart person's tour de force!

Beginning to end of a love affair in sonnet form?!!
One of my favorite books of poetry ever.No matter the gender of my lover, this is the book I read when things are going great...and when they fall apart.Sexy, deep, and gorgeous language.I'm always grateful she'saround.

Stepping carefully through old relations
Marilyn Hacker through her poetry describes her life with her lover, both in New York and Paris.She, being older, talks about insecurities and the torture of being away from the one you love.From the first meeting to the phone call goodbye, Marilyn describes the appropriate lust over another person.This poetry is amazing. ... Read more

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“Hacker is, to use a trite term, a major poet. More than that she is exciting and true.”—George SzirtesIn 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. ... Read more

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For over twenty years, award-winning poet, translator and editor Marilyn Hacker has been writing incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, dissident poets, poets whose work merited more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public. Unauthorized Voices includes pieces on Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Harrison, Marilyn Nelson and June Jordan, on French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Emmanuel Moses, on poetry and politics, and on the contemporary sonnet, all affirming Hacker as an original, unabashedly opinionated American critical voice. ... Read more

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Here is a rich collection of work from five books by one of America's most controversial poets. Marilyn Hacker's poems have been praised for their technical virtuosity, forthright feminism, political acuity, and unabashed eroticism.
Included are selections from Hacker's first book, Presentation Piece (1974), the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award Winner; Separations (1976); Taking Notice (1980), which was claimed as an integral part of the burgeoning feminist and lesbian canon; Assumptions (1985), which explored the conundrums of gender, race, and identity in contemporary life; and Going Back to the River(1990), which received a Lambda Literary Award.
Amazon.com Review
Marilyn Hacker's dark, complex poetic vision has a strange,often formal, beauty to it. Yet, when she writes in Living in theMoment: "I try to be a woman I could love./ I am probably wrong,asking/ you to stay . . ." one feels a very elemental tension betweenhope and fear, self-loathing and the need for love. It's a tangledinner life that Hacker is opening up for our inspection, and these arebeautiful and brave poems. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I Want to Be Marilyn Hacker When I Grow Up!
I suspect she can rattle off blank verse in iambic pentameter without thinking about it. She can be as earthy as Sharon Olds ("Mother II"), self-deprecating as Philip Larkin ("Riposte") or amusingly Byronic ("Ballade of Ladies Lost & Found.") I appreciate her older poetry, but my admiration increases as I read the newer work, particularly the poems from the most recent collection in this book, Going Back to the River; I would mention "April Interval," "Nights of 1964-1966: the Old Reliable," "Elevens" and `Against Silence" as being particularly striking. She is a diva at my favorite forms: the sonnet and the sestina, and now, thanks to her I have found a new one, the canzone.

Truly Deserving of its National Book Award
Hacker is a master of the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle.I'm always amazed when I arrive at the end of one of her poems and discover that elegant and natural words are arranged in one of these structured ways. Her words and images pull you into the poems and into Hacker's mind. Elegant.Beautiful. ... Read more

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Revealing book on poetry and gender
Catherine Cucinella's intense book about bodily representation provides a new way of seeing the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Its synthetic theorizations, illuminating close readings, and final dialogue with Chin bring the study of the represented female body to a new plateau. This book reveals all four of these poets in a new light, and it gives the best readings yet of Millay, Hacker, and especially Chin. Anyone interested in poetry, gender, feminism, or sexuality will find much to ponder here. An essential book. ... Read more

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In her seventh volume Marilyn Hacker confronts life and death at the end of our genocidal century, making another extraordinary contribution to the feminist and lesbian canon.Amazon.com Review
Marilyn Hacker's Winter Numbers is a meditation ondeath, a collection of painful poems in the wake of losing loved onesto AIDS and cancer. The numbers referred to here are the metronomicbeats of passing time, the mile markers on life's journey, the monthsremaining in a doctor's grim prognosis. The only solace is inconnection, as Hacker writes in Year's End: "Underneath thenumbers, how lives are braided." Highly recommended for the mortal. ... Read more

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Third of a four-paperback series of anthologies of "New Wave" SF. ... Read more

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Poetry of the present that looks back at Malroux's childhood and her father's life in the French Resistance and death at Bergen-Belsen. ... Read more

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Remembering A Long Gone Sun
Claire Malroux's booklength poem sequence, A Long Gone Sun, beautifully evokes life during the '30s and '40s in a small village near Toulouse in the south of France, evidently Saint- Sulpice or nearby, where traces of that life can still be seen and felt.Certainly the memory of World War Two still lives vigorously in that milieu of the poet's father, who was active in progressive politics and the Resistance, and who died as a result. The book is a subtle tribute to him and the world he helped to preserve.Malroux's unobtrusive imagist style suits her project, an oblique autobiography without egotism, a Bildungsroman in poetic form that also meditates on history's complex impacts upon the individual.She tells the truth but tells it "slant," as Emily Dickinson recommended. The translation by Marilyn Hacker echoes with grace and fidelity the syntax and internal rhymes of the original.Hacker has done a favor for American readers by introducing both a fine writer and a time and place worthy of our thoughtful attention. ... Read more

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"[Poems] of intense intimacy, beauty, andauthority." —W. S. MerwinMoving back and forth with the rhythm of the writer’s life, from Paris to New York, from the 1990s to the 1940s, Squares and Courtyards reminds us that, to take action, it is necessary to take notice. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Beautiful but not happy.
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.

Sappho in Khaki
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. ... Read more

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The first three books of one of our best poets, including her National Book Award-winning volume Presentation Piece, plus Separations and Taking Notice. "The wonder of Marilyn Hacker's poems...is that she insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice. The result, again and again, is a poem of intense intimacy, beauty and authority."—W. S. Merwin ... Read more

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Translated by notable American poet Marilyn Hacker, Lebanese-French poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata explores the formal and mythic attractions, congruencies and incompatibilities of the French and Arabic imaginations and poetic traditions in poems that open like a suitcase filled with alphabets. Sex, barrenness, exile, grief, and death - the backdrop of a war-ravaged country - are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent in lines varying from sinuous length to jagged and spare, their music unfettered, their metaphors lively, multilayered and unpredictable. But humour, the demotic voice, the storyteller's enchantments and an anecdotal sense of quotidian life are also omnipresent. Khoury-Ghata's is a vital voice in French and Francophone literature. ... Read more

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"Sixth in a series of pamphlets documenting ideas important in the evolution of lesiban/feminism." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

SENSITIVE, PROFOUND, SIMPLE & DOWN TO EARTH.
MARILYN HACKER DIGS DEEP INTO MANY RAW FEELINGS AND TRANSFORM THEM INTOTHE CELESTINES FOREVER HOUNDING AND TEARING US APART.SUCH SIMPLEIMAGERIES...CROSSING CULTURAL BORDERS. I AM A FILIPINO AND YET...IUNDERSTAND WHAT SHE IS TALKING ABOUT.WOMEN ARE WOMEN, EVERYWHERE. ... Read more

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