“Hacker is, to use a trite term, a major poet. More than that she is exciting and true.”―George Szirtes In Names, Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes glimpses of contemporary lives with dialogues undertaken in signal poetic voices. Using her signature wit, passion, and mastery of received and invented forms, she convinces us to believe in a world made possible by language―prescient, playful, polyglot, and often breathtaking. from “Ghazal: The Beloved”: Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved: when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved? Your every declaration is suspect. That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved. Were you merely a servant of the state or (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved? How pure you were, resistant in an orchard. Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.
Author
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English. Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.
