Names - Poems

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.

About the author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen volumes of poems. Her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She lives in Paris.

Product details

• Authors: Marilyn Hacker, Hacker Marilyn
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.06.2011
• EAN: 9780393339673
• ISBN: 978-0-393-33967-3
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 208 mm x 10 mm
• Weight: 142 g
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / General, Poetry by individual poets, Poetry / poems by individual poets