Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018

by Marilyn Hacker

Overview

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’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784107154
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	09/26/2019
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger's Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Venus Khoury-Ghata's A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses' Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh'ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

Table of Contents

Street Scenes

Lauds 3

Blazons 4

Again, for Hayden 8

Friends and Daughters 10

Paragraph 10

Ghazal: Across the Street 11

Itinerants 13

Ghazal: Style 20

Vendanges 21

A Farewell to the Finland Woman 24

Road Work 28

Ghazal: Myself 31

Canzone 32

Some Translations

Fadwa Suleiman: from 'Genesis', Laurel 37

Habib Tengour: First Apparition: Illustrious Stellar Alphabet 41

Sania Saleh: Autumn of Freedom 47

Guy Goffette: Five Poems 51

Golan Haji: Four Poems 55

Yasser Khanjer: Between Two Cells 59

Samira Negrouche: To Invent the Word? 62

Marie Étienne: from 'The Japanese Notebook' 65

Calligraphies and other poems

Le Sancerre: September 73

Calligraphies I 77

Ghazal: $$$ 84

Glose 85

Ghazal: Arabic 87

Pomegranate 88

Ghazal: Nothing 90

Calligraphies II 91

For Despina 97

Calligraphies III 99

Pantoum 104

Calligraphies IV 105

Nieces and Nephews 112

Calligraphies V 114

Ghazal: Your face 119

Calligraphies VI 120

Ghazal: The Dark Times 126

Ce qu'il reste à vivre 127

Calligraphies VII 131

Calligraphies VIII 136

After Forty Days ('Arbaoun) 143

Calligraphies IX 144

Calligraphies X 151

Index of Poem Titles 157