Marilyn Hacker

Desesperanto

One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor.

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir, meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto, then, is a universal language of despair—despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

"Swift and unfailing intellect carried by delectable tunes and tones: these are signal Hacker poems. In 'Blake's Mental Fight,' she's a golden champion, steadfast and acute. Her paeans to nature are to human nature; citizens of many worlds of class, color, and clime live in them. Her music is various. It plays high jinks with sound in a fine eulogy for Muriel Rukeyser. It rises somber in an ode, undercut by making the surreal real with a riderless mare flashing into and out of sight. How the neologistic title resonates: a universal language? a ghost of despair? or, my choice, a word about, toward, and for the dance of hope."—Marie Ponsot

"There is no finer poet alive than Marilyn Hacker. Her new work, Desesperanto, is a dark book: the word that recurs most often is 'grief.' But the reader, rather than feeling depressed, is exalted by such manifest skill, such formal richness, such unobtrusive craft." —Carolyn Kizer

"With joy I greet Marilyn Hacker's brilliant, measured lessons in overcoming loss—latest installments in an ongoing lifework that continues, with pluck and force, to prove form contemporary, possible, political. Her new poems—clear and moving as ever—create the context I call home."—Wayne Koestenbaum

"How singular that Ms. Hacker has become the most companionable of contemporary poets, even though her matter, her material concern, is so generally loss, erasure, decline or at least declension: You take the present tense along. Not because misery loves company (nor does it), but because these intimate poems are cast (and recovered) in a language which incorporates and embraces and savors. This is the bread (and the wine!) of common speech. We are being included in observant discourse—in a life after all."—Richard Howard

"The poet remembers war, illness, heartbreak, and intoxication and is enraptured, instructed, and transformed by the variegated beauty of life, the mysterious presence of mind, and the balm of language."—Booklist