What do you think?
Rate this book
Names: Poems
“Hacker is, to use a trite term, a major poet. More than that she is exciting and true.”―George Szirtes In Names , Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes glimpses of contemporary lives with dialogues undertaken in signal poetic voices. Using her signature wit, passion, and mastery of received and invented forms, she convinces us to believe in a world made possible by language―prescient, playful, polyglot, and often breathtaking.
from “Ghazal: The Beloved”:
Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved:
when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved?
Your every declaration is suspect.
That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved.
Were you merely a servant of the state
or (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved?
How pure you were, resistant in an orchard.
Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.
from “Ghazal: The Beloved”:
Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved:
when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved?
Your every declaration is suspect.
That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved.
Were you merely a servant of the state
or (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved?
How pure you were, resistant in an orchard.
Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Hardcover
First published November 23, 2009
84 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 27, 2017
Some of the poems were a little arcane for my taste. I found the political poems the most accessible to me. These lines from "Ghazal: dar al harb" seemed prophetic:
Plan your resistance, friends, I'll join you in the street,
but watch your backs: don't underestimate my country.
Where will justice and peace get the forged passports
it seems they'll need to infiltrate my country?
Plan your resistance, friends, I'll join you in the street,
but watch your backs: don't underestimate my country.
Where will justice and peace get the forged passports
it seems they'll need to infiltrate my country?
February 26, 2010
Marilyn Hacker is a poet after the heart of not just poetry readers but poetry writers. I was immediately enthralled by the rich language of this National Book Award winner—for Presentation Piece in 1974—a language pulsating with raw indignation at injustice and celebration of what are life’s quotidian and banal joys: the small pleasures of winter light, sips of Sunday coffee, and the company of friends. Her virtuoso use of wordplay strums the memories of one’s mind as only a writer of her caliber can, and I found myself by frenetic turns maddened and boisterous with the giggles started by the internal dialogue that she shares. Racy descriptions of five minutes after “she came” give way to descriptions of tanks, uniforms, guys, and testosterone.
Hacker is well known as one of the “New Formalism” poets shunning the free form poetic license that is currently en vogue. In particular, she is considered an expert of French poetic forms such as the villanelle. An example would be her 1986 sonnet verse novel Love, Death and the Changing of Seasons, and Names is now her most recent example. It includes poetic forms of ancient Islamic origin (ghazals), gloses that not only note but also illuminate the works of fellow poets such as Anna Akhmatova and Emmanuel Moses and letters in sonnet form to contemporaries.
A favorite is one of the ghazals entitled “dar al-harb,” or “house of war,” and it includes this critique of American power:
I might wish, like any citizen to celebrate my country
but millions have reason to fear and hate my country…
As English is my only mother tongue
it’s in English I must excoriate my country.
The good ideas of Marx or Benjamin Franklin
don’t excuse the gulags, or vindicate my country.
Who trained the interrogators, brought the bulldozers?
the paper trails indicate my country.
Hacker’s vivisection of American foreign policy is truly something to behold and questions the continuing presence in the national political landscape of the U.S. of exceptionalism. Americans cannot continue to proclaim a special destiny so long as we are nation that many fear as such a dichotomy of perspectives is corrosive.
The plain, clear sight of this author’s poetry was refreshing and removed some of that intellectual ennui which can sometimes preclude one from appreciate the daily wonders that allow each of us to experience the joie de vie.
Review by Brandon Copeland
Hacker is well known as one of the “New Formalism” poets shunning the free form poetic license that is currently en vogue. In particular, she is considered an expert of French poetic forms such as the villanelle. An example would be her 1986 sonnet verse novel Love, Death and the Changing of Seasons, and Names is now her most recent example. It includes poetic forms of ancient Islamic origin (ghazals), gloses that not only note but also illuminate the works of fellow poets such as Anna Akhmatova and Emmanuel Moses and letters in sonnet form to contemporaries.
A favorite is one of the ghazals entitled “dar al-harb,” or “house of war,” and it includes this critique of American power:
I might wish, like any citizen to celebrate my country
but millions have reason to fear and hate my country…
As English is my only mother tongue
it’s in English I must excoriate my country.
The good ideas of Marx or Benjamin Franklin
don’t excuse the gulags, or vindicate my country.
Who trained the interrogators, brought the bulldozers?
the paper trails indicate my country.
Hacker’s vivisection of American foreign policy is truly something to behold and questions the continuing presence in the national political landscape of the U.S. of exceptionalism. Americans cannot continue to proclaim a special destiny so long as we are nation that many fear as such a dichotomy of perspectives is corrosive.
The plain, clear sight of this author’s poetry was refreshing and removed some of that intellectual ennui which can sometimes preclude one from appreciate the daily wonders that allow each of us to experience the joie de vie.
Review by Brandon Copeland
November 24, 2010
Beautiful as always. Best read with tea while listening to Bach.
"Eggplant and peppers, shallots, garlic and cumin:
Let them be, married on my plate, my country"
(Ghazal: dar al-harb)
"I walked up the rue du Temple in the fog,
not a mist of exile and erasure,
but one from which memory and nomenclature
engage (Thank you, Wystan) in a dialogue
with dark streets redolent of almost-home."
(3. Names)
"Start another bottle of rough-tongued wine,
that sanguine glitter in the midnight mirror."
(4. Names)
"Can you tell the love that sets you free from the love that kills?"
(Ghazal: min al-hobbi m'a qatal)
"Eggplant and peppers, shallots, garlic and cumin:
Let them be, married on my plate, my country"
(Ghazal: dar al-harb)
"I walked up the rue du Temple in the fog,
not a mist of exile and erasure,
but one from which memory and nomenclature
engage (Thank you, Wystan) in a dialogue
with dark streets redolent of almost-home."
(3. Names)
"Start another bottle of rough-tongued wine,
that sanguine glitter in the midnight mirror."
(4. Names)
"Can you tell the love that sets you free from the love that kills?"
(Ghazal: min al-hobbi m'a qatal)
Read
August 24, 2010Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Hacker's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!
Want to read
January 8, 2010to-read
June 18, 2022
I have never felt less connected to a book of poetry than I felt while reading this. Yes, there are words on a page, but what do they mean? I don't know - they do not speak to me. Perhaps I am not erudite enough for this book. To be clear: I'm rating this one star because I did not connect. I'm sure these are excellent poems, and my rating has nothing to do with the quality of the book. I'm not a literature professor!
The most accessible poem of the bunch:
The most accessible poem of the bunch:
For Despina
Why is it I don't like closing the curtains?
Even pinning pans of blue voile together
cuts me off too much from the winter morning's
comings and goings
and the tall, reassuring neighbors' windows
some with window boxes, some with their shades down
some cracked open from last night, so cold air could
refresh a sleeper.
Pick the stitch up, there in the place I dropped it.
Weave the ravelled sides of the day together
if December sun in a bedroom window
calls for a garment.
There are alphabets I could still decipher,
learn to read a stanza, or write my name in.
There are conjugations of verbs instructing
speech, song and silence.
Fear or hope or both of them made of me a
child who thought I'd probably be abandoned
if I misbehaved, if I lied about my
parents - or didn't.
How are you a Jew? asked the young Greek woman
First, because I haven't the choice to not be.
Those who thought they chose found the same unchosen
barbed wire and ashes.
How am I a Jew? Through my mother's birthright,
turned into a death-warrant once; excuse to
seize the farms and villages of a people
"exiled by exiles."
You, the dead, my interlocutors, whether
friends or strangers - child on a no-man's land, her
satchel and school uniform clear in gunsights,
riddled with bullets --
while I clutch the moment, with a safe childhood
as my history, no grandparents' village,
no street where her father made shoes, his mother
measured out barley.
Strange that all I know of them is - religion?
Not if they had land, sent their sons to cheder;
Not which ones spoke Yiddish, Hungarian, or
Polish, or German.
Not which child, renamed, fed the pigs and dug up
frozen mud for potatoes; not whose notebook
browned inside a cupboard, while trains moaned through the
Galician winter.
Must a murdered child, after generations,
be avenged by gunning down other children
far away from winter and pigs, potatoes
and nameless railroads?
If a Jew may not deconstruct the question
(two Jews, didn't we say, and three opinions?)
if they call the peacemakers anti-Semites,
who are my cousins?
Lost lands which I never would call my country.
How are you American? she might ask me.
Language, economic determination.
Once, it was lucky.
January 11, 2018
I don't know how to review this. The strict form and conceit reminded me of my friend Roz Karen's poems, which also use strict form and meter to do dazzling things with language and also consider the poet as resister. Some of the lines were remarkably beautiful, too.
October 8, 2021
Enthusiasm dimmed by really not gelling with the ghazal as a poetic form in English.
Read
August 11, 2016I read this mostly while on a cross-state road trip for an arts event - so, in other words, in a van with a bunch of literary folk and least two or three other poets - and had to keep passing it around: look! read this! Read this! One fellow writer said: "she's so good with the gimmick it doesn't seem like a gimmick anymore."
But Marilyn Hacker is like that. Her command of form, or I should say form(s), is practically unmatched in contemporary poetry.
There are a lot of ghazals in this book (Ghazal: Summer and Ghazal: Myself are some of my favorites), and the beauty of that form in her hands, I think, is how she mixes everyday scenes of living with introspection, political claims, history:
"The air thickens, already more than half in summer.
At the corner cafe, girls in T-shirts laugh in summer
[...]
Slipped in a drawer under an expired passport,
curly-head in an orchard smiles for a photograph in summer.
[...]
Let them not, in Maryam's name or Marilyn's,
blot any cindered city off the graph in summer."
How, just how, do you get all that in one poem? Well, part because Hacker might be a force of casual genius, but in part because of the form. There are gloses, too, which I've never seen before: the deal is that a quatrain from another poem (mostly Hacker's translations, it looks like) serve as the closing lines for your own quatrains. These I was more puzzled about, but they do deepen the sense of literary ties and interweavings that happens in the collection; there are also her full translations of said pieces, letters to and poems for other poets (Mimi Khalvati and Hayden Carruth each show up more than once, and yes, I'm picking up their stuff next because of it!), references galore: "What's left, Francoise, of all last winter's snow? Nothing."
And one of the epistolary poems is in dactylic pentameter. In English. I didn't know anyone still tried that - I didn't know ANYONE could do it successfully:
"Paris was part of your salad days and your apprenticeships:
Benjamin, Baudelaire, bars, Henry James, Baroque opera.
When you returned to it, changed, had it changed for you? Every
street I walk down with one friend, then alone, then with somebody
else is three streets; is a new glyph incised on a palimpsest"
Doing that in a pretty rare English meter is awesome, and if we throw in a few similar lines that struck me from elsewhere in the poem ("and I was left a late-quinquagenerian celibate" or "Once one could say that Manhattan was barely America, / which -- in Manhattan -- was meant as an insider's compliment.") almost encapsulates Hacker's range.
More than any other poet who I love, I think Marilyn Hacker is a poet for our current age. She touches on high culture, low culture, Manhattan and Paris, blatant sexual/erotic language, meditations on death, language, love, queerness, and a deep concern with the globalizing world -- Europe's current multiculturalism, its history of anti-Semitism, the deep ethical concerns of being an American citizen in the age of American imperialism and war:
"I might wish to write, like Virginia, as a woman, I have none,
but women and men are crushed beneath its weight: my country." (Ghazal: dar al-harb)
Ah, and if you like sonnet sequences, "Names" is the sequence that gives its, well, name to the collection. Not my favorite of hers, but hey, that's only because there have been so many others...
But Marilyn Hacker is like that. Her command of form, or I should say form(s), is practically unmatched in contemporary poetry.
There are a lot of ghazals in this book (Ghazal: Summer and Ghazal: Myself are some of my favorites), and the beauty of that form in her hands, I think, is how she mixes everyday scenes of living with introspection, political claims, history:
"The air thickens, already more than half in summer.
At the corner cafe, girls in T-shirts laugh in summer
[...]
Slipped in a drawer under an expired passport,
curly-head in an orchard smiles for a photograph in summer.
[...]
Let them not, in Maryam's name or Marilyn's,
blot any cindered city off the graph in summer."
How, just how, do you get all that in one poem? Well, part because Hacker might be a force of casual genius, but in part because of the form. There are gloses, too, which I've never seen before: the deal is that a quatrain from another poem (mostly Hacker's translations, it looks like) serve as the closing lines for your own quatrains. These I was more puzzled about, but they do deepen the sense of literary ties and interweavings that happens in the collection; there are also her full translations of said pieces, letters to and poems for other poets (Mimi Khalvati and Hayden Carruth each show up more than once, and yes, I'm picking up their stuff next because of it!), references galore: "What's left, Francoise, of all last winter's snow? Nothing."
And one of the epistolary poems is in dactylic pentameter. In English. I didn't know anyone still tried that - I didn't know ANYONE could do it successfully:
"Paris was part of your salad days and your apprenticeships:
Benjamin, Baudelaire, bars, Henry James, Baroque opera.
When you returned to it, changed, had it changed for you? Every
street I walk down with one friend, then alone, then with somebody
else is three streets; is a new glyph incised on a palimpsest"
Doing that in a pretty rare English meter is awesome, and if we throw in a few similar lines that struck me from elsewhere in the poem ("and I was left a late-quinquagenerian celibate" or "Once one could say that Manhattan was barely America, / which -- in Manhattan -- was meant as an insider's compliment.") almost encapsulates Hacker's range.
More than any other poet who I love, I think Marilyn Hacker is a poet for our current age. She touches on high culture, low culture, Manhattan and Paris, blatant sexual/erotic language, meditations on death, language, love, queerness, and a deep concern with the globalizing world -- Europe's current multiculturalism, its history of anti-Semitism, the deep ethical concerns of being an American citizen in the age of American imperialism and war:
"I might wish to write, like Virginia, as a woman, I have none,
but women and men are crushed beneath its weight: my country." (Ghazal: dar al-harb)
Ah, and if you like sonnet sequences, "Names" is the sequence that gives its, well, name to the collection. Not my favorite of hers, but hey, that's only because there have been so many others...
May 26, 2011
Lovely book, elegant with form. The longer sequences, especially, are delightful to read.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews