Separations

by Marilyn Hacker

A congeries of verse forms charts and specifies personal, social, literary, geographical, and other separations that characterize the discordant dissatisfactions, agonizing losses, and desperate memories of our time

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Rahadyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

On rereading this (and Samuel R. Delany's literary and sexual autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, simultaneously) for the first time in about 15 years, I find myself thinking about the person I was in the early 1990s: aspirations, relationships, identity. Parts of Delany's memoir can serve as annotations to Separations, since some of the poems chronicle events from their early relationship. On its own, Separations is a daunting book to read but certainly worth a long while.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 H118p 1976