Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 [Hardcover]

Marilyn Hacker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2003

One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor.

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir, meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto, then, is a universal language of despair —despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Combining lucid, almost chatty autobiography, outspoken progressive politics and a casual mastery of elaborate forms, Hacker's work has won admiration for poems about city life, and (more recently) for translations of Francophone poets. All those skills receive a renewed airing in this confident 10th collection, which opens with an elegy to June Jordan and closes with elegiac sonnets, blank verse, a ghazal and even a canzone. Hacker's title fuses "despair" and Esperanto, and her book in some sense tries for both. Included are a chain of informative sonnets depicting Parisian streets and scenes: "Rue Beaurepaire" considers the "retired mail clerks, philoprogenitive/ Chinese textiles workers, Tunisian grocers" who keep a drug users' clinic from opening, while "Troiseme Sans Ascenceur" starts from "A square of sunlight on the study wall." Where other Anglos in Paris see the sights, Hacker celebrates everyday life in a multicultural, multiracial city, in poems that can read like a personalized travel guide. Freestanding, and perhaps deeper, poems comprise the volume's third section, mixing personal and public grief: angry about the warlike state of the U.S.-led world, Hacker tries hard to "Call the plumber again./ Remember how to think"; writes multiple poems to her ill friend, the poet Hayden Carruth; asks "Is it luck/ no one gets her old life back?"; investigates the ontology of migraine headaches; and searches for "something clearer about pain." If that clearer thing doesn't quite emerge here, the search remains a starting point.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hacker is a poet-lover of two cities, natal New York and adopted Paris, and she writes about their skies, streets, and citizens with sensory precision and an abiding sense of history. In her magnificent tenth collection, this veteran poet, editor, translator, and teacher channels her thoughts and feelings down two rivers, the Hudson and the Seine, and her liquid lines are themselves riverine in their reflections, swift currents, and shifting hues. Beautifully formed long poems offer vivid portraits of such admired individuals as war resisters and the late writers Joseph Roth and June Jordan, while a series of breathtakingly elegant sonnets provide vibrant collages of city life, such as a pastiche of different languages in a park percolating with romping children and chatting adults. Clouds sail on a strong wind, leaves fall, flowers falter under rain, the aroma of baking bread twists enticingly through a window, lovers take late-night cabs across fog-draped bridges, and women wearing lace park their motorcycles outside a bar. The poet remembers war, illness, heartbreak, and intoxication and is enraptured, instructed, and transformed by the variegated beauty of life, the mysterious presence of mind, and the balm of language. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393054187
• ISBN-13: 978-0393054187
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,183,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names (Norton, 2009) Essays on Departure (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006)and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). Her ten volumes of translations from the French include Emmanuel Moses' He and I (Oberlin College Press, 2009), Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008) which received the 2009 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Nettles (The Graywolf Press, 2008). She lives in New York and Paris andteaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the City College of New York. She is a past recipient of the Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets' Prize, the National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Study your French, December 10, 2003

By 

Shaquanna Johnson (Greenville, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (Hardcover)

Marilyn Hacker's collection of poems, Desesperanto, is a blend of American subjects and French flair. The poetry collection is a look into the woman herself. Her thoughts, concerns in the world, and her sorrow of the friends that she has lost in the recent years. The poems here are very thought provoking and insightful. They are designed to challenge the reader to go a step beyond the passive reading most are accustomed to. Hacker's use of the French language is designed to add melody and rhythm to the poems, while forcing the reader to run and find a French-to-English dictionary. I'm not sure if this is a book I would choose for beginning poetry classes. It is a work that I would recommend for advance poetry fans and perhaps a women's literature course.
My personal favorite out of the collection is "English 182." The poem explores the emotions of an English professor (Hacker) attempting to gain some sense of her students. The speaker singles out a young African-American student that never participates in class discussions and eventually plagiarizes a paper. The speaker responds by reaching out to the student, by attempting to teach on African-American female poets.
The poem reaches out to me as a Black student because I have often felt isolated in all White classes, learning about figures that I cannot relate to. Despite the fact that the speaker does teach about Black women, it can be very difficult to speak up in a class where you are the only minority. It is my experience that many professors often feel that Black Students should feel obligated to speak out in class. They feel that if there is little representation of the Black race in the class, those few students should feel compelled to speak up for the entire population. Rather than feeling obligated to speak, my of these students retreat into their own shell when faced with the task of being the only Black in class. Hacker does a great job exploring the issues of failure with the poem. I would love to see her tap into theme of insufficient minority representation in the university setting.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read the Book, January 7, 2004

By 

Julie Fay (Montpeyroux, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hacker's review, December 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (Hardcover)

After reading Hacker's book Desesperanto I felt like I knew her with out knowing her. She writes beautifully about her life, friends, where she grew up, her get-away place(Paris), and her strong opinions about politics. Through imagery and word usage she gives the reader the setting, the time, and the emotional state she was in. You can hear the train in New York, see the cafes in Paris, and smell the Lapsang Souchong. The use of French gives you a better sense of what she was trying to capture in this collection and a good explanation of her life in New York and in Paris.