Blazons

This generous new volume is a sequel to Essays on Departure (Carcanet, 2006) collecting a quarter century's work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker brings together material from eight books, including a generous excerpt from the erotic verse novel Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons, and new work written in a vertiginously changing political world. Hacker writes narrative poems, lyrics and elegies; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental.

Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include Donne, Akhmatova, Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Roth, and the Algerian Kateb Yacine. In the past decade, this exchange has been informed by Hacker's celebrated translations of contemporary French poets, and a selection of this work is included alongside her own poems. Her poetry has been celebrated for its keen observation of her two cities, New York and Paris, its fusion of precise form and demotic language, its music, its memory, and its stubborn delectation of life.

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker was born in New York City in 1942. She lives in Paris. She is the author of several books including Essays on Departure(Carcanet, 2006) and the following books of poetry, FirstCities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (2003); Squaresand Courtyards (2000); Winter Numbers (1994), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Selected Poems 1965-1990 (1994), which received the Poets' Prize; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986); Assumptions (1985); Taking Notice(1980);Going Back to the River (1990), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award; Separations (1976); and Presentation Piece (1974), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. She also translated Venus Khoury-Ghata's poetry, notably the award-winning Alphabets of Sand (Carcanet, 2009).