For anyone who believes in the true "craft" of poetry, Marilyn Hacker is a breath of fresh air. Far to the opposite of the spectrum of purely narrative poetry, Hacker's work -- throughout her career -- has demonstrated the true skill a poet can achieve through meter and rhyme.
Selected Poems 1965-1990 spans five of Hacker's previous collections, including Presentation Piece, Hacker's first collection, which was widely-acclaimed and got her some well-deserved notice in the literary world.
Hacker's poems are extraordinarily structured, typically following the sestina or villanelle form, usually rhymed, sometimes tossing in a Pantoum or two. Hacker uses all types of rhymes in her poetry -- perfect rhymes (such as mate, gate, late), off-rhymes that provide assonance (shoot, tune, reputed), and off-rhymes that provide rich consonance (shoot, mate).
But Hacker's poems should not be read focusing on the form; rhymes should not distract you from the actual subject matter of the poem. Hacker's works are best read as sentences, with the natural pauses and inflections that sentences receive. Don't let the form distract you. In this aspect, Hacker has truly demonstrated the enormous skill of putting together fantastic contemporary poems within the confines of a rigid classic structure.
As I mentioned above, the subject matter Hacker covers in her poems is noteworthy. Hacker writes terribly personal poems and is the first poet I've read who can accurately yet compassionately address the heart-wrenching task of caring for someone (for Hacker, it's her mother) with diabetes. These lines from "Fifteen to Eighteen" are sad and compelling:
. . . If she rolls off on the floor,
I can't / she won't let me / lift her up. Fructose
solution, a shot and she'd come around.
At half past two, what doctor could I call?
Sometimes I had to call the hospital.
More often, enough orange juice got down,
splashed on us both . . .
Did you spot the cbbc rhyme pattern of the third through sixth lines?
Hacker's deeply emotional poems center around the important relationships in her life: her mother, her (ex)husband, her daughter, her lovers. Hacker writes about her male and female lovers with equal passion, but her devotion to her daughter is what really shines through in a great many of her poems. "Iva's Birthday Poem" is playful -- as evidenced in these lines -- and is very different from any of the other poems in the collection:
All horns should honk like anything!
All taxicabs should come alive
and stand on their back wheels and sing
that Iva Alyxander's five!
The fish are burbling in the lake,
the bees are buzzing in their hive,
the candles flicker on the cake
that Iva Alyxander's five!
As is the problem with rhymed or formal poetry, the true skill comes in making the form invisible. It is difficult to write lines where the rhymed words don't seem forced into place, or where you have to scramble the natural sentence structure to make it "fit." Some of these tricks are apparent in the selections from Hacker's earlier books, but those tricks are not readily apparent in her later works. Hacker's earlier works also have a tendency to reach into non sequitur to fit the rhymes and form.
Overall, I admire this collection for its showcasing of Hacker's passion and skill. It has a great deal of depth and emotion, all while exhibiting the potential of the poetic form in the hands of a fantastic poet.
