John Redmond reviews Essays on Departure by Marilyn Hacker

Are they ‘essays’, then? No, it is a collection of poems, a New and Selected covering the period 1980 to 2005, but the word is a fair warning of the book’s academic flavour. As the biographical note informs us, Hacker, who teaches at various institutions, “divides her time between New York and Paris”. This lifestyle crack runs down many of the poems. Few readers of the book are likely to be tempted by the life of the poet-academic as she describes it: lonely, fugitive, and underpaid.

That is not to say that the collection is entirely gloomy. In her early career, Hacker specialized in the kind of frankly sexual poem which would probably earn her a place in The Faber Book of Lust (if such a thing existed). Somewhat in the manner of James Simmons’ work, her poems made a virtue of playful crudity, although one wonders if a male poet could get away with lines like these:

O little one, this longing is the pits.
I’m horny as a timber wolf in heat.
Three times a night, I tangle up the sheet.
I seem to flirt with everything with tits.

Hacker has been associated with an American phenomenon, the New Formalists and many of the titles in this book (‘Chiliastic Sapphics’, ‘Migraine Sonnets’ and ‘Ghazal: The Beloved’) make the association hard to forget. Intentionally or not, this evangelical approach to form presents it as morally improving, somehow good for the soul, and challenges readers to agree or disagree.

One of Hacker’s favourite forms is the epistle. It is a curious fact about modern verse-letters, that, whether written by James Fenton, Michael Longley, or W. S. Graham, they often resemble each other. Perhaps their Audenesque DNA is to blame? Derek Mahon, another fan of Auden, has praised Hacker loudly and, reading her book, epistles of his, like ‘Beyond Howth Head’ and ‘The Sea in Winter’, spring readily to mind. This is the opening, for instance, of Hacker’s ‘Letter to Julie in a New Decade’:

I think of you in all that Irish mist
in which you’re writing out your solitude
impatiently: the morning’s Eucharist
is gruel, or finnan haddie; clouds intrude
on crag and moor and rain-drenched Gothic heap —
at least they do when I imagine it.
Up on the hills are huddled flocks of sheep
that leave behind them little cairns of shit.

Here we find many features of the Audenesque epistle: a stagey premise, self-conscious rhyming, rickety generalizations, alternating bursts of high and low culture, and, overall, the quality once described by Michael Hoffman as “freeze-dried descriptiveness.” The use of “impatiently” shows the structural strain. Is the adverb intended to modify (a) the description of the speaker’s thinking or (b) that of the addressee’s writing. Is this syntactic blur intentional or lazy? The most interesting moment comes in the sixth line, where the writer, deliberately, informally, draws attention to her limitations of technique or vision. This is a typical example of epistolary self-correction. One thinks of Auden’s “There is no other rhyme except anoint” in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ or of W. S. Graham’s anxious questioning in ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’: (“ … am/ I greedy to make you up/ Again out of memory?/Are you there at all?”) While the willingness to admit imperfection may be attractive, it can also give rise to the kind of meandering informality favoured by some poets in mid-career. In the end, one reacts negatively to the way the poems seem to declare: “Yes, I’m casually constructed — but, don’t you see? — that’s the point. And I’m using rhyme too (in case you think I can’t.)”

Hacker’s poems are anxious to be labeled. The reader keeps tripping over statements of identity rather than striking lines — “I’m still alive, an unimportant Jew/ who lives in exile …” or “Among Americans/ my polyglot persona disappears,/ another Jewish Lesbian in France.” One feels that these identifications are of a piece with her self-conscious formalism. The referencing  fills the work with proper names — friends and acquaintances, writers living and dead, places visited — which give the excerpts from Hacker’s life much-needed texture. In particular, her portraits of New York in the 1960s, have a documentary interest.

The problem with Hacker’s formalism is that it is formulaic. In a typical poem of hers, mention of time and place is swiftly followed by a few lines of local description, then an intimate shift to the poet’s personal life, followed by an identity-statement which establishes her in relation to some larger historical pattern, before the poem concludes in wise-sounding generalizations. ‘Dusk: July’, for example, closely follows this pattern. The poem starts with a description of the season (“Late afternoon rain of a postponed summer”), makes a sketch of  the neighbourhood, moves to sudden personal relevation (“I would love my love, but my love is elsewhere”), then links her personal circumstances to the horrors of the twentieth century (AIDS, the Holocaust) and ends portentously:

I just want to wake up beside my love who
wakes beside me. One of us will die sooner;
one of us is going to outlive the other,
but we’re alive now.

Of course, Hacker did not invent this set-piece formula — one thinks of ‘September 1, 1939’ and ‘Skunk Hour’ as other examples, but even these poems are only saved from starchiness by interesting twists of psychology and sharp phrasing. Some poems succeed despite their form, not because of it.

Auden and Lowell — the dominant poets of Hacker’s youth — seem appropriate points of reference for her mid-Atlantic, mid-century style. Adrienne Rich, who has similar influences, does it better. As in the concluding lines of ‘Hayden Carruth’, one closes this book admiring Hacker’s enthusiasm, her devotion to the provisional life of the poet, without feeling that she has described it memorably:

… there’s a stack of student endeavours that
I’ve got to read, and write some encouraging
  words on. Five hours of class tomorrow;
  Tuesday, a dawn flight to California.

 

Essays on Departure, Carcanet Press, £12.95, ISBN 1 9030 3978 9

 

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.