Customer Reviews

Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002

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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.

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.

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.

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

I do not doubt the talent or craft of Hacker in her writing-It was just difficult to love her poems because it was so hard to relate. Hacker's imagery and way with words and rhythm is something I admire. Also, her published tribute to her friends such as June Jordan, Muriel and Hayden is an eternal way to show your love and endearment for someone. Another admiration I have for Hacker's writings is her ability to weave in tangible realities into her poems as well as her knowledge of books. There are too many to quote, so I just hope you'll see for yourself when you read the book.
I would not recommend this book to a college student such as myself. I found many of Hacker's poems to be redundant and unattached. It was hard for someone like my self to relate to many of her poems; one, because of the switch in language. Since I do not know French, it was difficult to grasp what she was trying to say. Even after looking up phrases, it was still hard to make sense of it all. Also, she describes many places in Paris and some traditions. To better appreciate it, I think that the reader would have to had visited or lived there as well.
As a recommendation to the publishers: A guide and a history of Hacker as well as the people she writes about would be wonderful to be published along with this book. It would help out a lot!

Ashley Braswell

If you don't have a lot of time on your hands, or have difficulty getting through poetry, then this book is not for you. This is definitely an advanced read, it's not just a curl up by the fire type book, it's an intense work of art. Her vast knowledge of two different worlds (Paris and America) have been brought together here in this book. She does a great job of relating extraordinary things, to your ordinary person. Hacker is lyrical, and have a magnificent way with words. There are many poems in this book that stand out. She is a very literal writer, it is very evident that her whole heart is put into her work. When you read this, you have a sense of her, what she is about. I enjoyed this book, it is a great way to get your mind jumping, and thinking, and working. If that's what you are looking for, then this is it. If you are looking for an easy read, then stick with nursery rhymes.

Hacker does is a good poet, she knows what she is doing. And while I enjoyed much of the poetry within this book, I personally feel it need to come wiht a readers guide. There is a good amount of French within the text, and for readers like myself, I lost some of the meaning because i did not know the language. Besides that factor this is a fantastic read, Marilyn really knows how to keep the reader keep reading. She has a special touch that only poets know how to do.

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.

Hacker'd Desesperanto seems to be a collection of poems which are heavily inspired by acquaintences, experiences, and societies known by the poet. When the collection begins with an elegy for June Jordan- a former social and political activist- stating, "June, you should be living the states are bleeding", the reader is granted clues on Hacker and what might inspire her. Issues such as fast food advertising and urban sprawl are examples of these inspirations Hacker used to write her poems. We also saw in English 182, a social issue which touches base with every american system. That is education failing students and discouraging their adult teacher who just didn't get through. Hacker seems to muse very frequently on topics which are seen daily, but not stopped and thought about