A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014

by Marilyn Hacker

Overview

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A selection of poems that addresses the quotidian and the global, from one of our most essential poets.

Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker’s generous selections in A Stranger’s Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp.

In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafés, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype—perhaps with gunfire in the background.

These poems course through sonnets and ghazals, through sapphics and syllabics, through every historic-organic pattern, from renga to rubaïyat to Hayden Carruth’s “paragraph.” Each is also an implicit conversation with the poets who came before, or who are writing as we read.

A Stranger’s Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world—far off or up close as the morning’s first cup of tea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353310
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

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.

Table of Contents

New Poems

Casting Out Rhymes 3

Pantoum in Wartime 5

Pantoum 7

Room 9

Fugue on a Line of Amr bin M'ad Yakrib 10

Paragraphs 12

Headaches 14

Syria Renga 16

October Sestina 23

Sapphics in Winter 25

Three Variations on Fado Themes: 26

Tahrîr 26

Sahar al-Beitunia 27

Mack Boat 29

Alcaics for a Wedding 30

Fadwa: The Education of the Poet 31

Dahlia and Fadwa 33

… But in Things 35

Chapter 36

A Stranger's Mirror 37

Ghazal: Outside the door 44

Ghazal: In the wind 45

Ghazal: For it 46

Ghazal: A woman 47

Râbi'a's Renga 48

Luzumiät: Necessities of what was unnecessary 55

From Winter Numbers

Against Elegies 63

Nearly a Valediction 69

Days of 1992 71

Elysian Fields 74

A Note Downriver 76

An Absent Friend 77

Cleis 78

Quai Saint-Bernard 81

Year's End 83

Cancer Winter 85

From Squares and Courtyards

Street Scenes: Sunday Evening 97

Scars on Paper 100

The Boy 104

Days of 1994: Alexandrians 106

Rue Debelleyme 108

Again, the River 111

Wednesday I.D. Clinic 115

Squares and Courtyards 117

from Paragraphs from a Daybook 121

From Desesperanto

Elegy for a Soldier 143

Crepuscule with Muriel 148

Alto Solo 150

Rue des Écouffes: 153

Rue des Écouffes 153

Les Scandaleuses 153

Les Scandaleuses II 154

Nulle part 154

Ghazal on Haifa Line by Adrienne Rich 156

Grief 158

Explication de texte 161

Chanson de la mal aimée 166

Paragraph for Hayden 169

Quoi de neuf sur la guerre? 170

Ghazal 173

Omelette 174

For the 6th of April 177

Jean-Michel Galibert, épicier à Saint-Jean-de-Fos 179

A Sunday After Easter 181

Desesperanto 185

Canzone 189

Respite in a Minor Key 192

Morning News 193

Essay on Departure 196

Some Translations

Claire Malroux: Grottoes 201

Marie Étienne: Ochre Night 204

Vénus Khoury-Ghata 209

Guy Goffette: Elegy for a Friend 215

Emmanuel Moses: from Preludes and Fugues 221

Jean-Paul de Dadelsen: The Last Night of the Pharmacist's Wife 227

The Bridges of Budapest 229

From Names

Ghazal: In Summer 235

Lettera amorosa 236

Glose: O Caravels 237

from "O Caravels" 239

1953: The Bus to Menton 240

Glose: Storm 241

Storm 243

For Kateb Yacine 244

Ghazal: Waiting 248

Glose: Willow 249

For Anna Akhmatova 251

Glose: Jerusalem 255

from "The Year of the Dragon" 257

Letter to Mimi Khalvati 258

Letter to Alfred Corn 260

Ghazal: dar al-harb 263

Names 265

Ghazal: min al-hobbi ma qatal 273

Paragraphs for Hayden 274

Ghazal: Begin 279

A Braid of Garlic 281

Index of Titles and First Lines 285

Editorial Reviews

"For Hacker devotees . . . an essential book; for people just discovering her work it is a beginning."

Lambda Literary

"A major poet . . . she transcends the very material she collects and alters."

Kenyon Review Online - Grace Shulman

01/19/2015
Composed of new poems, work from four previous collections, and a handful of translations, this third volume of selected work from Hacker (Names) stands as a textured but unified testament to her output over the past two decades. Lyric meditations firmly grounded in the daily and the political reflect shifts the self, in current affairs, and the poet’s aesthetic development. Hacker has long made use of received forms and traditional structures as a counterpoint to her direct, open language. This volume highlights the increased prevalence of formal verse in her oeuvre, as well as the variety of forms and the diversity of their cultural provenance. A striking number of the poems are occasional—some were written in response to current events—but just as many are about matters of personal importance to the author, and the discourse surrounding them. Though Hacker’s meditations on desire, age, illness, and other aspects of her life can be very intimate, the lens is always outward, the self suffused with a sense of connection to friends, strangers, cities, and histories both inherited and in the making. Whatever the origins of particular poems, one constant in the collection is Hacker’s signature conflation of public and private spheres in the service of heightened awareness and empathy. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Hacker] remains an undisputed master of formal verse… one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today. No other poet manages the casual pyrotechnics she accomplishes in form."

Los Angeles Times - Carol Muske-Duke

[Hacker] remains an undisputed master of formal verse… one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today. No other poet manages the casual pyrotechnics she accomplishes in form.

Carol Muske-Duke - Los Angeles Times

★ 02/15/2015
Multiaward winner Hacker (Names; Desesperanto) continues to write with an unflinching clarity. "The body [of her work] is a festival," notes the introduction, a feast of form and feminism, a banquet of the political and politic. In her latest volume, she brings readers generous selections from four previous collections, as well as translations and 25 new poems that range in location from the Middle East to the bedroom. Hacker writes in multiple forms, in crowns of sonnets, sestinas, ghazals, and rengas, mirroring the world's terrors while exploring the poet's relationships to and relevance in these worlds. Her poems leave "all the parentheses filled," using a language that is often intimate and always verbally dexterous, painstakingly musical, and formal and colloquial at the same time. Though composed in the voice of another, these lines could describe Hacker's life as a poet: "I live in my own house now. In my line of vision,/ an almond tree flowers. I live by words,/ .and on each page I write a letter to my brothers." VERDICT While spanning 20 years of Hacker's poetry, this volume has an immediacy that makes it ageless. An important book from an essential poet.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal