Blazons

Reviews / Votes

'Combining toughness with tenderness, uniting the personal with the political, using traditional forms for new and urgent purposes, reaching out to others and otherness, taking the poem into divided and often terrifying circumstances, Hacker's Blazons confirms just how uncompromising, lucid and lyrical her poetry is.'

Maitreyabandhu 'It is difficult to think of a poet writing today who could surpass Marilyn Hacker's combined formal, sonic and linguistic dexterity... Hacker's poems reach with both hands towards an intimacy of place, language, knowledge and more. Even towards the lyric self, where there is sometimes a wry sensibility, there is also very often an acknowledgement of an in-betweenness. Relating perhaps to Hacker's own life as a Jewish American now living in Paris - the poet-traveller raises her shield, forms her report, hoists the herald, all of these in English and French types of blazons, in order to correspond with her reader, another, the self.'

Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring Bulletin 2019 'She has rendered these forms supple, natural, and substantial and has filled them with energy both intellectual and emotional... her poems are works of heroic reportage from the front delivered in a crisp hard bitten New York colloquial style that is counterpoise to the architecture of the form.'

George Szirtles, The Poetry Review, Summer 2019 'Her forms are invariably generous, inviting the reader in as a participant which entrains our emotions like a melody... Marilyn Hacker has style' Norbert Hirschhorn, London Grip 'Witness Blazons filled with poems using form and formal devices with apparent ease and joy. Her discipline is also reflected in language and syntax that are rich and syncopated....While Hacker's mastery of form and language continue to delight, her discipline as a translator, as a poet equally committed to other poets and with political implications, also inspires.... If poetry is a practice, a discipline, Hacker is one of the greatest masters and Blazons is one of her achievements from her practice and discipline.'

Julie R Enszer, The Rumpus 'The ghazal form is tailor made for Hacker's poetic gifts: poignant wit,precision handled with dash, aplomb, and a raised eyebrow, the dance on the fine line between too little and too much'

Annie Finch, New Letters 'There is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker. Indeed, I view Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018 as a brief for that case.'

A.M. Juster, L.A. Review of Books 'This unadorned empathy and Hacker's formal accomplishment establish an imprint on the page; an imprint which is never heavy or cloying but beds the poems on the page, makes them sit with solidity and a kind of inevitability. Hacker is a poet for whom the trajectory of the poem is patiently, but intensely controlled.'

Ian Pople, The Manchester Review 'Very fine poetry... her translations were lovely'

Leah Fritz, Acumen 'Translated forms give rise to the morphic quality of Hacker's language, whilst still maintaining the truth of her subject.'

Elizabeth Ridout, Agenda 'The literal translation of images and sources from French, Francophone and Arabic poets serves Hacker's elegant fusion of the contemporary, the colloquial and the precise, spare form, to create new communication of the experiences of the refugee and the bilingual, the world citizen.'

Elizabeth Ridout, Agenda