Squares and Courtyards: Poems

by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is one of America's best-known and beloved poets. Her well-wrought, formalist meditations on everyday life, history, illness, and womanhood -- among other topics -- have won her nearly every major poetry prize and a devoted readership the world over. Her new collection, Squares and Courtyards, opens with these

       Is it the boy in me who's looking out

       the window, while someone across the street

       mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout

       pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?

This initial image -- a boy at a window, gazing outside at the nearby world -- says a lot about Hacker's particular poetic gift. She's like the child in this poem, gazing out and consolidating what she sees into brief lyrical utterances. And indeed, this very window-gazing image recurs in the collection's title poem, in an italicized coda that sums up Hacker's poetic project even more

       Not knowing what to thank or whom to bless,

       the schoolgirl at the window, whom I'm not,

       hums cadences it soothes her to repeat

       which open into other languages

       in which she'll piece together sentences

       while I imagine her across the street...

Hacker might well still be that boy, gazing across the street at a schoolgirl at a different window, imagining her being soothed by her fantasies. There are whole imaginative universes, Hacker demonstrates, within very small spaces, and one way to read this collection's title is that every "square," every "courtyard" (bounded, perhaps, by inhabited ground-floor windows), is a fertile ground for anybody who takes the trouble to look closely.

Hacker's poems have an old-fashioned charm that is largely due to her use of meter and rhyme schemes. It's downright unnerving to encounter contemporary cultural reference points, like "Starbucks coffee," in iambic pentameter! And reading only a few of Hacker's poems might make you wonder why so few poets stick with the rules of Hacker's poetry has the disciplined regularity of measured speech, and the reader is carried along, comfortably, from image to image, by "cadences it soothes her to repeat."

Hacker has some recurring preoccupations; for one, she's obsessed with death and suffering. This general fascination extends into some subcategories that come from her own the legacy of Nazi Germany and her own battle with breast cancer. "Invocation," perhaps the collection's most moving poem, is a sort of catalogue of breast cancer victims that begins,

       This is for Elsa, also known as Liz,

       an ample-bodied gospel singer, five

       discrete malignancies in one full breast.

       This is for auburn Jacqueline, who is

       celebrating fifty years alive,

       one since she finished chemotherapy,

       with fireworks on the fifteenth of July.

Before "Invocations" is through, we've met "June, whose words are lean and mean/as she is," and "long-limbed Maxine,/astride a horse like conscience," and "Alicia, shaking her dark black hair,/dancing one-breasted with the sabbath bride," and many others. Hacker's genius lies in isolating the everyday and elevating it to a symbolic status. At times, one can almost get lost in the minutiae of her world, but the reader who sticks with her is always rewarded; this is most true in the long sequence "Paragraphs from a Daybook," which closes Squares and Courtyards. This group of 41 15-line poems at first seems almost like an arbitrary collection of images and chance meetings -- "On the market street are bums...I talk with one"; "Chinese schoolgirls draft their own fables..." -- but as the poems build on one another, Hacker's themes of death, suffering, and imagination's redemptive power begin to shine through.

One fascinating result of reading Hacker is the tendency to see nearly every line as a microcosm of the whole; she writes in lyric fractals. "The nuances of sorrow, grief and pain" (from the "Daybook" sequence) seems the perfect encapsulation of her poems, but then only lines later, we encounter this new summation, which may well be the long-sought answer to Yeats's question "How shall we know the dancer from the dance?": "The movement is the potter's, not t...

Genres: Poetry

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English.

Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.

Reviews

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes the squares and courtyards are the parks and private property of New York and Paris. Then my attention wanders.

Sometimes the squares and courtyards are the empty spaces left behind when a person who is loved dies. Frames for an absence. Then I listen. Hacker is an incredible poet about death. Even when she's desperately trying to write about anything else:

"It’s easier to talk about politics
than to allow the terror that shares
both of our bedrooms to find words."

I loved the form of "Paragraphs from a Day Book" -- a series of 15 lines each, ostensibly written in a schedule book. This piece about being an American in France comes from there (but warning: if you read it, the phrase "lick our leader's lizard boots" might stick with you all day):

However well I speak, I have an accent
tagging my origins: that Teflon fist,
that hog wallow of investment
that hegemonic televangelist's
zeal to dumb the world down to its virulent
cartoon contours, with the world's consent:
your heads of state, in cowboy suits
will lick our leader's lizard boots.
My link to that imperial vulgarity
is a diasporic accident:
pogroms in Austria, in Hungary,
the quota, the boat, the apartment
up six cabbagey flights, overtime in the garment
trade, the children fiercely intent
on speaking well, without an accent.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marilyn Hacker's brush with breast cancer produced this poetry book in 2000 about the deaths of people in her circle from cancer, HIV and accidents. Luckily, she survives to this day.

[Keaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first half: two and a half stars, maybe three
the second: five

[Robby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw this book at a park in Beverly for 5 dollars, and automatically picked it up to buy it. A local bookstore was having a book sale in the park, and there were books and books and books spread all over half a dozen tables. I bought 5 books that day, and this book was one of them.
Marilyn Hacker is a National Book Award winning poet who splits her time between New York City and Paris, who has released something like 13 collections of poetry in her career. She attended NYU when she was a teenager, my age, and has changed the world of poetry permanently. I could feel it, the weight of Marilyn’s words, as I read this collection.
These poems were about a lot of things, breast cancer and AIDS and love and beauty, acceptance, growth, and they were beautiful. The first half of the book was better for me than the second, because I found something I loved in almost every single poem and I wanted to just read them over and over again. The second half was a little flat but the poems there were still just as beautiful, dedications to a few special people in Marilyn’s life. There were things that came up again and again, memories and words, and everything about this book had a certain glow to it, and it spread to me.
Usually when I am reading a book by an author I don’t know much about I read as much as I can about them, articles and interviews and occasionally reviews of criticism. The one thing I read a few times about Marilyn’s work, that she is criticized for, is that her work is flat, emotionless. I could feel that at times, though at other times it didn’t matter at all to me. There was a flow to these poems, which I expect is because she is fluent in both English and French, both of which have their own certain current.
I went along with it.
I’m happy I read this. I will read more of Marilyn’s collections, in the future.
Poetry reminds me why I love the written word, and also the spoken. Marilyn Hacker is a gift.

[Corinne Blackmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

read

[Meter]

These poems were boring. I read to the middle of the book and didn't find anything I liked.