Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

by Marilyn Hacker

Overview

This critically acclaimed sonnet sequence is the passionately intense story of a love affair between two women, from the electricity of their first acquaintance to the experience of their parting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351118
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	234 KB

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen volumes of poems. Her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She lives in Paris.

Editorial Reviews

Inspired by passion for one of her poetry studentsRachel of the ``leonine hair''Hacker poured out this extraordinary, long sonnet sequence, with an occasional villanelle thrown in, over the course of their yearlong, mostly long-distance love affair. Since the lovers are often apart, the book is as much a personal diary cum colorful travelogue (during this time Hacker commutes with her young daughter between Manhattan's Upper West Side, Paris and Venice) as it is an account of lust, ecstasy, yearning, jealousy and betrayal. These sonnets are graphic, colloquial and immediate; Hacker's command of the straitening, fixed form, which often seems archaic and empty when used by other poets, is a stunning achievement. (October)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Don't let the abstract title mislead you. This lengthy sequence of formal, rhymed sonnets laced with villanelles chronicles an obsessive lesbian love affair with a direct, colloquial, fleshly passion (``We'll do just fine when we can jam together/the necessary parts''). Against the chic scenery of Paris, Manhattan, and Provincetown, Hacker recounts states of separation and sexual longing focused so tightly on the beloved that the whirl of cafes, bars, and shopping sprees could not seem more superfluous. At times the series slows to self-indulgencecatalogs of lunches eaten, clothes wornbut Hacker's impressive technical skills, combined with the sensitivity of her subject and her straightforward diction, prevent the book from becoming the flat diary a lesser poet might have written.Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.

Library Journal

Elegant and versatile in the strictest forms, [Hacker] is inventive and exuberant in content. She's colloquial, lyrical, uncouth, old-fashioned, and fun. (How many books of poems are fun?) . . . No one sings quite like this. A capella, she's a whole choir. "

From the Publisher

Elegant and versatile in the strictest forms, [Hacker] is inventive and exuberant in content. She's colloquial, lyrical, uncouth, old-fashioned, and fun. (How many books of poems are fun?) . . . No one sings quite like this. A capella, she's a whole choir.

New York Times Book Review