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A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014
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 rubaiyat 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.
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 rubaiyat 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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 12, 2015
6 people are currently reading
130 people want to read
About the author
Marilyn Hacker
112 books76 followersMarilyn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 29, 2017
You’ve become—and I never would have wished it—
something like a metaphor of the passage
(time, a cobbled alley between two streets which
diverge, a tune that
re-emerges out of the permutations
rung on it by saxophone, bass and piano,
then takes one more plunge so its resolution’s
all transformation).
Someone’s always walking away; the music
changes key, the moving men pack the boxes.
There the river goes with its bundled cargo:
unanswered letters.
*
As you leave the place, you bring the time
you spent there to a closed parenthesis.
Now it is part of that amorphous past
parceled into flashes, slide-vignettes.
You’ll never know if just what you forget’s
the numinous and right detail, the key—
but to a door that is no longer yours,
glimpse of a morning-lit interior’s
awakening silhouette, with the good blue
sky reflected on the tall blue walls,
then shadow swallows what was/wasn’t true,
shutters the windows, sheathes the shelves in dust,
retains a sour taste and discards the kiss,
clings to the mood stripped of its narrative.
You take the present tense along. The place
you’re leaving stops, dissolves into a past
in which it may have been, or it may not
have been (corroborate, but it’s still gone)
the place you were, the moment that you leave.
*
Where’s the “you” to whom I might write a letter?
*
Spare me, she prays, from dreams [...],
from involuntary memory, from the love that kills.
something like a metaphor of the passage
(time, a cobbled alley between two streets which
diverge, a tune that
re-emerges out of the permutations
rung on it by saxophone, bass and piano,
then takes one more plunge so its resolution’s
all transformation).
Someone’s always walking away; the music
changes key, the moving men pack the boxes.
There the river goes with its bundled cargo:
unanswered letters.
*
As you leave the place, you bring the time
you spent there to a closed parenthesis.
Now it is part of that amorphous past
parceled into flashes, slide-vignettes.
You’ll never know if just what you forget’s
the numinous and right detail, the key—
but to a door that is no longer yours,
glimpse of a morning-lit interior’s
awakening silhouette, with the good blue
sky reflected on the tall blue walls,
then shadow swallows what was/wasn’t true,
shutters the windows, sheathes the shelves in dust,
retains a sour taste and discards the kiss,
clings to the mood stripped of its narrative.
You take the present tense along. The place
you’re leaving stops, dissolves into a past
in which it may have been, or it may not
have been (corroborate, but it’s still gone)
the place you were, the moment that you leave.
*
Where’s the “you” to whom I might write a letter?
*
Spare me, she prays, from dreams [...],
from involuntary memory, from the love that kills.
February 8, 2021
I was eager to sample more of Marilyn Hacker’s poetry after enjoying a number of excerpts included in Samuel Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water. Though he was gay and she now identifies as a lesbian, Hacker and Delany were married from 1961-1980 and she was a central figure in the memoir. Hacker won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry in 1995 for Winter Numbers, which deals with her experiences with breast cancer and losing friends to AIDS.
I am not an expert on poetry, but I was interested to compare Hacker’s earlier work with some more contemporary, and was in luck when my library’s one book of hers was this collection, A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014, which collects new poems, translations of French poetry, and selections from Winter Numbers (1995), Squares and Courtyards (2000), Desesperanto (2003), and Names (2009). Unfortunately, my experience with this collection fell short of my earlier enjoyment of her work. I’m not asserting that this book is bad (I wouldn’t know the first thing), but just in the ‘not for me’ camp, as very few of the poems stood out or made an impact on me. I think that comparing these poems with the few I’d read already, it’s not that the poems were lesser, rather that I was desperately missing the surrounding prose context to ground my understanding of them. Of course it’s also possible that for a poetry novice, reading nearly 300 pages of poetry in a week was too fast, and maybe I would have enjoyed the collection more had I taken additional time, but I set that pace intentionally for fear of setting the book down and never picking it back up if I gave myself a lot longer to finish.
One the thing I loved was all the poetry forms Hacker employs. I think most of the poetry I’ve read since the days when it was assigned in school has been free verse, and it was exciting to encounter new-to-me forms, like my new favorite the pantoum. I was most moved by her works dealing with the AIDS crisis, illness, ageing and loss. While overall this collection didn’t hit the spot for me, I am proud that I stretched myself to read something so different.
I am not an expert on poetry, but I was interested to compare Hacker’s earlier work with some more contemporary, and was in luck when my library’s one book of hers was this collection, A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014, which collects new poems, translations of French poetry, and selections from Winter Numbers (1995), Squares and Courtyards (2000), Desesperanto (2003), and Names (2009). Unfortunately, my experience with this collection fell short of my earlier enjoyment of her work. I’m not asserting that this book is bad (I wouldn’t know the first thing), but just in the ‘not for me’ camp, as very few of the poems stood out or made an impact on me. I think that comparing these poems with the few I’d read already, it’s not that the poems were lesser, rather that I was desperately missing the surrounding prose context to ground my understanding of them. Of course it’s also possible that for a poetry novice, reading nearly 300 pages of poetry in a week was too fast, and maybe I would have enjoyed the collection more had I taken additional time, but I set that pace intentionally for fear of setting the book down and never picking it back up if I gave myself a lot longer to finish.
One the thing I loved was all the poetry forms Hacker employs. I think most of the poetry I’ve read since the days when it was assigned in school has been free verse, and it was exciting to encounter new-to-me forms, like my new favorite the pantoum. I was most moved by her works dealing with the AIDS crisis, illness, ageing and loss. While overall this collection didn’t hit the spot for me, I am proud that I stretched myself to read something so different.
November 29, 2019
Thank you Steve, thank you Jill
The Boy (p. 104)
Is it the boy in me who's looking out
the window, while someone across the street
mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutterspout
pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?
(Because he flinched, because he didn't whirl
around, face them, because he didn't hurl
the challenge back --"Fascists?" -- not "Faggots"--"Swine!"
he briefly wonders--if he were a girl...)
He writes a line. He crosses out a line.
[...]
The Boy (p. 104)
Is it the boy in me who's looking out
the window, while someone across the street
mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutterspout
pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?
(Because he flinched, because he didn't whirl
around, face them, because he didn't hurl
the challenge back --"Fascists?" -- not "Faggots"--"Swine!"
he briefly wonders--if he were a girl...)
He writes a line. He crosses out a line.
[...]
January 15, 2019
Two things stand out about this poetry collection. First is the way that she works within a wide variety of traditional forms--sonnet crown, ghazal, glose, pantoum, etc.--yet does not write stuffy poetry. I'm rarely drawn to poetry this structured, yet hers has a vitality.
Second is the international flavor of her work. She is an American Jewish lesbian living in France who has studied Arabic language and literature. The new poems that begin this collection are written in response to recent upheavals, including the Syrian Civil War.
Second is the international flavor of her work. She is an American Jewish lesbian living in France who has studied Arabic language and literature. The new poems that begin this collection are written in response to recent upheavals, including the Syrian Civil War.
May 2, 2024
DNF
I like sad poems but I'm dealing with a big pile of nonfiction and poetry from the library right now, and this one isn't landing with me. I'm struggling a bit to describe what's missing: I like when the feelings hit me right in the gut, but these feel more like being buried in them.
I like sad poems but I'm dealing with a big pile of nonfiction and poetry from the library right now, and this one isn't landing with me. I'm struggling a bit to describe what's missing: I like when the feelings hit me right in the gut, but these feel more like being buried in them.
February 17, 2025
Hacker has very solid poetic technique... it just wasn't my cup of tea
October 14, 2015
I read this because it was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry in 2015.
This volume is not collected poems of Marilyn Hacker, but still a pretty significant collection spanning from 1994 to previously unpublished works, and also some of her translations. You would think it would be hard to find anything to join these together, but I think most of the time Hacker is talking about identity in the face of disease, distress, and loss. Her newer poems struggle with immigration and losing a sense of belonging, how to find a home in a space that has rejected you.
I actually found a line in a poem that I think sums most of it up, from "Days of 1994: Alexandrians"
"Lunch: as we close the twentieth century,
death, like a hanger-on or a wannabe
sits with us at the cluttered bistro
table, inflecting the conversation."
Many of Hacker's poems are long ones with sections, which tend not to be my preference, but I think poetry readers will find a lot of depth here.
This volume is not collected poems of Marilyn Hacker, but still a pretty significant collection spanning from 1994 to previously unpublished works, and also some of her translations. You would think it would be hard to find anything to join these together, but I think most of the time Hacker is talking about identity in the face of disease, distress, and loss. Her newer poems struggle with immigration and losing a sense of belonging, how to find a home in a space that has rejected you.
I actually found a line in a poem that I think sums most of it up, from "Days of 1994: Alexandrians"
"Lunch: as we close the twentieth century,
death, like a hanger-on or a wannabe
sits with us at the cluttered bistro
table, inflecting the conversation."
Many of Hacker's poems are long ones with sections, which tend not to be my preference, but I think poetry readers will find a lot of depth here.
July 20, 2015
This is the first book of poems by Marilyn Hacker that I've read, and I will definitely be looking for more of her work. She has an unusual style of writing the distinguished her from many other poets, and her poems are rich and provocative,
May 5, 2015
I am a poetry fan and found the authors included in this book worth reading. Poetry being selective to the reader I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
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May 1, 2015811.54 H118st 2015
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews