Squares And Courtyards: Poems,Used

From BooklistNational 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 journalkeeping 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 OlsonProduct DescriptionA ninth anthology of poetry by a winner of the National Book Award, Lenore Marshall Prize and Poets' Prize celebrates the diverse passages of life, along with the community of friends, the courage of those living with terminal illness, and the mysteries of life and death.From Publishers WeeklyDailiness and disease fuel the awardwinning 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 heavyhanded imagery ('She herself/ was now a box of ashes on a shelf/ whose sixteenyearoldshadow 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 40page '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 antiSemitism)and searing selfexamination: '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.ReviewSquares and Courtyards delineates life in two cities, on two continents, histories of pleasure and of resistance, of celebration and struggle. Marilyn Hacker's work is highly principled and densely peopled; this is a profoundly inhabited poetry, full of streets and studios and apartments, the shelters and cafes in which people live. Here are the human gestures and transactions which inscribe those lived spaces, detailed for us with love, acute intellect and unfailing formal grace. Mark Doty, author of Heaven's Coast : A Memoir and Sweet MachineA deeply thoughtful travelogue through this awful century, through cancer, through too great cities, and through love and loss, this is a book of poems to blow off the top of your head. Marilyn NelsonFew poets address the dilemma of mortality with the grace, bravery and insight of Marilyn Hacker. But these poems go beyond the elegiac; they are ceremonies of conscience. The poet pays homage to the de