About the Book
A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation
Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019
This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker’s engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman’s call for ‘an internationality of languages’.
About the Author :
Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris. Marilyn has contributed to the Carcanet Blog: click here to read her two-part Letter from Paris.
Review :
'Combining toughness with tenderness, uniting the personal with the political, using traditional forms for new and urgent purposes, reaching out to others and otherness, taking the poem into divided and often terrifying circumstances, Hacker's Blazons confirms just how uncompromising, lucid and lyrical her poetry is.'
Maitreyabandhu
'It is difficult to think of a poet writing today who could surpass Marilyn Hacker's combined formal, sonic and linguistic dexterity... Hacker's poems reach with both hands towards an intimacy of place, language, knowledge and more. Even towards the lyric self, where there is sometimes a wry sensibility, there is also very often an acknowledgement of an in-betweenness. Relating perhaps to Hacker's own life as a Jewish American now living in Paris - the poet-traveller raises her shield, forms her report, hoists the herald, all of these in English and French types of blazons, in order to correspond with her reader, another, the self.'
Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring Bulletin 2019
'She has rendered these forms supple, natural, and substantial and has filled them with energy both intellectual and emotional... her poems are works of heroic reportage from the front delivered in a crisp hard bitten New York colloquial style that is counterpoise to the architecture of the form.'
George Szirtles, The Poetry Review, Summer 2019
'Her forms are invariably generous, inviting the reader in as a participant which entrains our emotions like a melody... Marilyn Hacker has style' Norbert Hirschhorn, London Grip
'Witness Blazons filled with poems using form and formal devices with apparent ease and joy. Her discipline is also reflected in language and syntax that are rich and syncopated....While Hacker's mastery of form and language continue to delight, her discipline as a translator, as a poet equally committed to other poets and with political implications, also inspires.... If poetry is a practice, a discipline, Hacker is one of the greatest masters and Blazons is one of her achievements from her practice and discipline.'
Julie R Enszer, The Rumpus
'The ghazal form is tailor made for Hacker's poetic gifts: poignant wit,precision handled with dash, aplomb, and a raised eyebrow, the dance on the fine line between too little and too much'
Annie Finch, New Letters
'There is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker. Indeed, I view Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018 as a brief for that case.'
A.M. Juster, L.A. Review of Books
'This unadorned empathy and Hacker's formal accomplishment establish an imprint on the page; an imprint which is never heavy or cloying but beds the poems on the page, makes them sit with solidity and a kind of inevitability. Hacker is a poet for whom the trajectory of the poem is patiently, but intensely controlled.'
Ian Pople, The Manchester Review
'Very fine poetry... her translations were lovely'
Leah Fritz, Acumen
'Translated forms give rise to the morphic quality of Hacker's language, whilst still maintaining the truth of her subject.'
Elizabeth Ridout, Agenda
'The literal translation of images and sources from French, Francophone and Arabic poets serves Hacker's elegant fusion of the contemporary, the colloquial and the precise, spare form, to create new communication of the experiences of the refugee and the bilingual, the world citizen.'
Elizabeth Ridout, Agenda
