Calligraphies: Poems

by Marilyn Hacker

A formally brilliant and powerful volume from “one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today” (Carol Muske-Dukes,  Los Angeles Times ). Moving from Paris to Beirut and back,  Calligraphies  is a tribute to exiles and refugees, the known and unknown, dead and living, from the American poet Marie Ponsot to the Syrian pasionaria Fadwa Suleiman. Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker finds resistance, wit, potential, and gleaming connection in everyday moments―a lunch of “standing near the fridge with / labneh, two verbs, and a spoon”―as a counterweight to the precarity of existence. With signature passion and agility, Hacker draws from French, Arabic, and English to probe the role of language in identity and revolution. Amid conversations in smoky cafes, personal mourning, and political turmoil, she traces the lines between exiles and expats, immigrants and refugees. A series of “Montpeyroux Sonnets” bookends the volume, cataloguing months in 2021 and 2022 in which the poet observes a village “in pandemic mode” and reflects on her own aging. In a variety of tones and formal registers, from vivid crowns of sonnets to insistent ghazals to elegiac pantoums and riffs on the renga,  Calligraphies  explores a world opened up by language.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Hardcover

Published April 4, 2023

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

[Stacie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read (belatedly) for Poetry with Pat. Ghazals, Pantoums, Calligraphies, oh my! These highly structured poems challenged this reader who usually enjoys a more anything goes kind of style (as long as the poem is on the short side). These poems, written of war zones both political and ideological, and within those distancing days of the coronavirus pandemic, place our masks over our faces, making each breath a struggle - in a good way? The poems are mostly numbered so the titles don’t really jump out so I guess you’ll just have to read some and find out which are your favorites.

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I have been carrying in my backpack for the past couple months. Waking up to poetry again ever since Marilyn Hacker's "Montpeyroux Sonnets 7" was featured in the Poem of the Day earlier this year. I printed it out, then gave it away. I'm so disappointed it isn't included in this Calligraphies collection, which ends with "Montpeyroux Sonnets 5." So now I know there is a 6th to look for. A collection of political grief / apolitical despair, covid, aging, language, loss, sonnets, ghazals, damn.

🍂

Two languages, two books, stay shut, while in-
stead of reading, I let sunlight fill
the question/answer blanks inside my head

🍂

known by pen, night, desert, sword.
My horse and my notebook think

what am I thinking
through an orgy of cadence.
I loved one woman

whose heart gave out when she read
my letter, that I'd return.

🍂

Remember longing
when it was legitimate,
remember writing

in an emerging language,
given words by desire for

what? To still be young
in a world not besotted
with its oligarchs?

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hacker writes crown sonnets and ghazals like nobody’s business. This breathtaking collection describes the pandemic years and its devastating losses with the keen eye of a poet whose vision never blurs, whose insight never dims despite the “dark times” that loom ahead.

Favorite Poems:
“Ghazal: Myself” (wowza!)
“Pantoum”
“Calligraphies IV”
“Calligraphies V”
“Ghazal: Your Face”
“Ghazal: The Dark Times”
“Calligraphies VIII”
“Calligraphies IX”
“Listen”
“Ghazal: This Winter”
“Ghazal: [Out]”
“Calligraphies XI”
“For Marie Ponsot, Remembering”
“Ghazal: [Heart]”
“Ghazal: Beirut”
“Montpeyroux Sonnets 5”

[Sam Cox]

some of these suffered from being specific almost to the point of meaninglessness for the reader; like it’s clearly about something personal to the poet, but without context i can’t glean anything from what little is given in the text. that said, i really appreciated the attention to form throughout the collection.

[Desirae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely.

[Booked 📚 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Morgan Radley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one of the better poetry collections I've read about war and the deep pain it inflicts.

[Urvashi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection made me feel physically unwell as all collections by diaspora discussing the refuge of their families through their war-torn home countries does