Calligraphies: Poems

by Marilyn Hacker

Overview

A formally brilliant and powerful volume from “one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today” (Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times).

Moving from Paris to Beirut and back, Calligraphies is a tribute to exiles and refugees, the known and unknown, dead and living, from the American poet Marie Ponsot to the Syrian pasionaria Fadwa Suleiman. Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker finds resistance, wit, potential, and gleaming connection in everyday moments—a lunch of “standing near the fridge with / labneh, two verbs, and a spoon”—as a counterweight to the precarity of existence.

With signature passion and agility, Hacker draws from French, Arabic, and English to probe the role of language in identity and revolution. Amid conversations in smoky cafes, personal mourning, and political turmoil, she traces the lines between exiles and expats, immigrants and refugees. A series of “Montpeyroux Sonnets” bookends the volume, cataloguing months in 2021 and 2022 in which the poet observes a village “in pandemic mode” and reflects on her own aging.

In a variety of tones and formal registers, from vivid crowns of sonnets to insistent ghazals to elegiac pantoums and riffs on the renga, Calligraphies explores a world opened up by language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324086451
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.00(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.

Editorial Reviews

"In Calligraphies, Marilyn Hacker further cements her position as one of our greatest contemporary masters of poetic form. Elegant and yet homespun, cosmopolitan yet grounded, Hacker's poems (in the shapes of sonnets, tankas, ghazals) document and sing the lives of exiles, her friends from Beirut to Paris and beyond. Thriving on what Edward Said called 'late style,' that period of an artist's practice where they face the end, Hacker has become a poet not only for her (and our) twilight age, but for the ages."

Philip Metres

"A book of morally infused witness for our troubled times."

Lawrence Joseph

★ 04/17/2023

These formally ambitious and energetic poems by Hacker (A Different Distance) feature a progression of sonnet crowns, ghazals, sapphics, pantoums, and linked haiku that carry the reader through a litany of maladies. These include the pandemic, political and personal pains (“the desiccated nerves of lost desires”), the plight of refugees, the difficulty of learning Arabic, and the loneliness of quarantine. Each stanza picks up a thread from the last, the dismal emotional weather relieved by the pleasures of a good wine, an open-air market, or a veal chop. Hacker calls out nonsense as she sees it: “‘To write a sonnet is a fascist act’—/ Suggest that to the next tyre-burning goon this winter!” But she is equally hard on herself, as in the witty and perfect ghazal she calls “Myself.” She dedicates poems to Karthika Nair, a French Indian poet, and Fadwa Suleiman, the late Syrian actor and civil war activist—two among the many people Hacker has worked with in Paris and elsewhere. These varied and powerful poems highlight the healing that resides in poetic collaboration and friendship across borders. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Calligraphies’ etymology of 'beautiful writing' proves true and moves us into the future as Hacker’s sly insight, salty candor, and masterful craft has done for nearly 50 years. Our sage femme of form and politics, her language from Paris, New York and Beirut, is always the cry from the street—and the heart—because Hacker is one of our great translators of the human experience."

Jessica Greenbaum

★ 04/01/2023

Following Blazons, the multi-award-winning Hacker examines love, war, resistance, literature, memories, and aging, but what she does best is capture the everyday: the tastes and smells of food, coffee, and wine, and, most importantly, the clashes of languages and cultures, particularly in Beirut, Paris, and the French village of Montpeyroux. Even as she captures the fear and stasis of pandemic, her empathetic questioning of what makes a good life brings these poems to a deeper level. "History trundled// beneath, gravel on a barge,/ ground down to its origins," she says at one point and, as she contemplates loss and loneliness, "My feet/ have lost the memory of roads that run/ from town to hamlet, from Belleville to Saint-/ Denis." Throughout, Hacker uses multiple forms, from the ghazal to the sonnet, and the repetition of words and phrases brings music and emotional depth to many of the poems. VERDICT Occasionally, a phrase brushes improbability ("My horse and my notebook think// what I am thinking/ through an orgy of cadence"), but these poems breathe with life; even in a collection this large, the reader stays involved. "On the road,/ cars rarify, whisk by trees that explode/ in redbud, apple blossom, presage fruit": a poetic journey not to be missed.—Doris Jean Lynch

Library Journal