Selected Poems 1965-1990 [Hardcover]

Marilyn Hacker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1994

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 the Moment: "I try to be a woman I could love./ I am probably wrong, asking/ you to stay . . ." one feels a very elemental tension between hope and fear, self-loathing and the need for love. It's a tangled inner life that Hacker is opening up for our inspection, and these are beautiful and brave poems. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Tracing Hacker's (Assumptions) poetic development here will make an intriguing journey for both new and familiar readers of this leader of the feminist/lesbian poetry movement. Hacker's signature style-passionate, technically deft-is spotlighted in early poems such as "Elegy," paying tribute to the agonized "sandpaper/ velvet" throat of Janis Joplin. The poet has noted that "subjects choose us, not otherwise": by the 1980s, her subjects were avowedly feminist, ranging from political ideology in "Coda" to eros in "La Fontaine de Vauclause." Other poems disclose her "taking notice" of her estranged relations with her diabetic mother, and of her daughter Ira, "born hero" and "found... flawed." Recent poems find Hacker's stance forthrightly gay ("unsaintly ordinary female queers"), yet her style has become more muted, especially in written reveries about the chaotic 1960s. This collection deserves honors for its great heart and its embrace of the female condition.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 17, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393036758
• ISBN-13: 978-0393036756
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,139,525 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:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly Deserving of its National Book Award, April 9, 2000

By 

Krista (COLLEGE PARK, MD, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selected Poems 1965-1990 (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Want to Be Marilyn Hacker When I Grow Up!, September 7, 2006

By 

Anna Evans (Hainesport, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selected Poems 1965-1990 (Hardcover)

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.