Blazons

New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018

Marilyn Hacker

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781784107154
• eBook ISBN: 9781784107161
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation

Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019

This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker's engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman's call for 'an internationality of languages'.

Calligraphies and other poems

Le Sancerre: September

September morning schemes of the possible:

the open sky, the late japonica, the blue day.

Noon approaches on the interplay

of what’s imagined, what’s forgotten, will

stay in the focus of a gaze that’s still

fixed forward. There’s an afterwards, to say

the rest, to mingle meanings. Let me stay

where I am, on the arc, in the break of the interval.

It rained enough through August that the trees

in the square touch a green cusp of clarity;

there’s still tousled lavender near the duck-pond.

The stout proprietor of the café

puts tables out for lunch on the bare ground

– the beach beneath the torn-up paving-stones.

The beach beneath the torn-up paving-stones

presents itself as facile metaphor:

desire beneath betrayal’s scab. Not scar

yet, not yet completely overgrown

with some kind of impenetrable skin

rebarbative in aspect, not made for

caresses, nerveless. This is something tempor-

ary; what’s underneath will, in its own

time emerge: abrasive, maybe, smooth

perhaps, resposive to the touch, who knows?

Noon’s apex is invaded by shadows

daily more swift. Time is the truth,

it seems, untrutfully, as a cycle glows

into its decline, as the shadow grows.

Recline into the shadow as it grows

velvety like a cheek some finger yearned

to stroke. Almost everyone has returned

from shore or mountain Elsewheres. Traffic slows

around striped barriers. Jackhammer-blows

presage new trees among the paving stones.

We fiddle while some Elsewhere city burned,

to be reported on the evening news.

The patron tells an old man at the bar

about the night he heard Sidney Bechet.

(A teenager dragged another boy away

from the loud conflagration in the square.

The sky spit fire.) He changes the CD,

adjusts the volume: ‘Br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Street Scenes
• Some Translations
• Calligraphies and other poems
• Index of Poem Titles
• Also by Marilyn Hacker
• About the Author
• Also by Marilyn Hacker from Carcanet
• Copyright