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Winter Numbers: Poems
Poems deal with mortality, AIDS, cancer, aging, social indifference, and human relations
95 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
6 people are currently reading
196 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 30, 2012
Winter Numbers is one of my favorite books by Marilyn Hacker. The poems, while discussing topics of loss, are full of delightful rhythm, subtle manipulation of form and meter, and effective use of rhyme.
The lengthy opening poem, “Against Elegies,” talks about loss of friends through AIDS and cancer.
My old friends, my new friends who are old,
or older, sixty, seventy, take pills
with meals or after dinner. Arthritis
scourges them. But irremediable night is
farther away from them; they seem to hold
it at bay better than the young-middle-aged
whom something, or another something, kills
before the chapter’s finished, the play staged.
Hacker then broadens the concept of loss to loss of humanity through genocide and political events.
But this was another century
in which we made death humanly obscene:
Soweto El Salvador Kurdistan
Armenia Shatila Baghdad Hanoi
Auschwitz Each one, unique as our lives are,
taints what’s left with complicity,
makes everyone living a survivor,
who will, or won’t bear witness for the dead.
There are many references to the Holocaust, some overt and some more indirect, and Hacker’s Jewish heritage. In a series of 5 poems, “Street Scenes III,” starts off describing a common sight in Paris, a “wand of bread” sticking out of a shopping bag balanced on a bike basket, and ends with these lines:
French guards tore up the loaves they took from him
and flung them at the thousands-Jews-penned there
-children, women and men-on their way to die.
Much of Hacker’s writing is infused with the fact that she is a lesbian. Some of the loveliest poems in this collection are about and/or to lovers.
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You went as deep down as I’d ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse.
(Nearly A Valedictorian)
The final section, Cancer Winter, contains sonnets discussing Hacker’s own experience with breast cancer, mastectomy and recovery. The sonnets are presented as a series, not individually titled, and they are connected not only by the theme of breast cancer, but with repeated words and phrases. Hacker situates her personal situation in the context of the political:
It’s not gang rape in Bosnia or
gang rape and gutting in El Salvador.
My self-betraying body needs to grieve
at how hatreds metastasize.
Hacker succinctly describes her writing in an interview by Jennifer Dick:
… the pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me. Of course a fixed meter is not the only way to create that tension, it's one way, but for me it's a reliable way, and a reliable pleasure.
(www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/p-verbat...),
The lengthy opening poem, “Against Elegies,” talks about loss of friends through AIDS and cancer.
My old friends, my new friends who are old,
or older, sixty, seventy, take pills
with meals or after dinner. Arthritis
scourges them. But irremediable night is
farther away from them; they seem to hold
it at bay better than the young-middle-aged
whom something, or another something, kills
before the chapter’s finished, the play staged.
Hacker then broadens the concept of loss to loss of humanity through genocide and political events.
But this was another century
in which we made death humanly obscene:
Soweto El Salvador Kurdistan
Armenia Shatila Baghdad Hanoi
Auschwitz Each one, unique as our lives are,
taints what’s left with complicity,
makes everyone living a survivor,
who will, or won’t bear witness for the dead.
There are many references to the Holocaust, some overt and some more indirect, and Hacker’s Jewish heritage. In a series of 5 poems, “Street Scenes III,” starts off describing a common sight in Paris, a “wand of bread” sticking out of a shopping bag balanced on a bike basket, and ends with these lines:
French guards tore up the loaves they took from him
and flung them at the thousands-Jews-penned there
-children, women and men-on their way to die.
Much of Hacker’s writing is infused with the fact that she is a lesbian. Some of the loveliest poems in this collection are about and/or to lovers.
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You went as deep down as I’d ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse.
(Nearly A Valedictorian)
The final section, Cancer Winter, contains sonnets discussing Hacker’s own experience with breast cancer, mastectomy and recovery. The sonnets are presented as a series, not individually titled, and they are connected not only by the theme of breast cancer, but with repeated words and phrases. Hacker situates her personal situation in the context of the political:
It’s not gang rape in Bosnia or
gang rape and gutting in El Salvador.
My self-betraying body needs to grieve
at how hatreds metastasize.
Hacker succinctly describes her writing in an interview by Jennifer Dick:
… the pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me. Of course a fixed meter is not the only way to create that tension, it's one way, but for me it's a reliable way, and a reliable pleasure.
(www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/p-verbat...),
June 9, 2022
word-children, we will send each other words that measure distances we have to keep defining.
December 28, 2021
from Corona
"I think of all the things I’ll never know.
“I wish I was older,” the young girl said. “Why?”
“So I would know more.” You and she and I
spanned twenty years among us. While you drove
serpent curves through vineyards and olive groves,
she read The Bell Jar, till we stopped to buy
Chianti at a cave, upturned the bell
to shining tulips where the garnet wine
perfumed our morning."
"I think of all the things I’ll never know.
“I wish I was older,” the young girl said. “Why?”
“So I would know more.” You and she and I
spanned twenty years among us. While you drove
serpent curves through vineyards and olive groves,
she read The Bell Jar, till we stopped to buy
Chianti at a cave, upturned the bell
to shining tulips where the garnet wine
perfumed our morning."
December 15, 2025
It's probably a mistake to read a poetry book and watch football at the same time!
I understood nothing.
I understood nothing.
October 1, 2012
I'm awed at how Marilyn Hacker writes in the intersection of clarity, memory, and the present moment. She writes personal/confessional poems that are clearly about a specific situation but still managed to speak to my (different) situation and have a rich reading either way. I really like how she sneaks in rhymes without being obvious about it. I'm really glad that I read an advice blog that answers some of its questions with poetry recommendations, leading me to Hacker's work.
May 7, 2008
A really lovely collection, with some AMAZING formal verse--the corona is pretty killer, as is the longer sonnet sequence "Cancer Winter." I actually got out my trusty pencil and scanned some of the poems, or marked their rhyme schemes trying to figure out Hacker's patterns. Some of the poems in the second section left me a little cold, but overall, a really strong collection.
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December 2, 2016811.54 H118w 1994
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews