Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
by Marilyn Hacker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marilyn HackerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-05
ISBN: 0393054187
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
Book Review: Witness-Visionary of the Heart, Mind, Body and Body Politic
Summary: 5 Stars
The emotional urgency, complexity and freshness of Marilyn Hacker's poems in her most recent collection DESESPERANTO (2003), work seamlessly and forcefully with their formal mastery and prosodic inventiveness. The originality of her rhyme and the pressure she places on her meter reinvigorate fixed forms to create a unique counterpoint with her poems' emotional power and the daring of their subject matter. The result is work that is always poignant, reflective, energetic and generous in its good-natured and unfaltering humanity by one of America's most important poets of social conscience, of the body and the body politic. This poetry allows us to enter the tonal range of the poet's griefs, joys and her meditative quandaries into the nature of these so that we may learn from her how we might have the courage to enter our own. Hacker, as always, opens new doors widely, showing us that to be socially engaged and personal, erudite and playful, intellectual and raw, a witness to the largest issues of our time and an incisive observer of the daily, passionate and inclusively human, while reworking form to make it her own, give rise to poetry that is among the most potent and necessary being written in English today. In her "Elegy to a Soldier," a sequence dedicated to the memory of poet/writer/scholar/activist June Jordan, Hacker weaves together the everyday details of a life intensely lived along with her own and Jordan's deeply metaphysical and political consciousness. The rawness of real life is savored and celebrated while also seen into and connected with a vision that burns through surfaces. Hacker writes, "Now your death, as if it were 'yours': your house, your / dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. / Death's not 'yours,' what's yours are a thousand poems / alive on paper..." Marilyn Hacker's work is a guidebook that leads us into and through ourselves, singing to us with prayerful attention that we must live as fully as possible each day of our lives no matter what, that the acceptance and melding of hope and despair together, create a light that illuminates what is needed for a just world of endless possibility
Summary of Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
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.Poetry Books
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