Calligraphies: Poems
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A formally brilliant and powerful volume from “one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today” (Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times).
Moving from Paris to Beirut and back, Calligraphies is a tribute to exiles and refugees, the known and unknown, dead and living, from the American poet Marie Ponsot to the Syrian pasionaria Fadwa Suleiman. Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker finds resistance, wit, potential, and gleaming connection in everyday moments—a lunch of “standing near the fridge with / labneh, two verbs, and a spoon”—as a counterweight to the precarity of existence.
With signature passion and agility, Hacker draws from French, Arabic, and English to probe the role of language in identity and revolution. Amid conversations in smoky cafes, personal mourning, and political turmoil, she traces the lines between exiles and expats, immigrants and refugees. A series of “Montpeyroux Sonnets” bookends the volume, cataloguing months in 2021 and 2022 in which the poet observes a village “in pandemic mode” and reflects on her own aging.
In a variety of tones and formal registers, from vivid crowns of sonnets to insistent ghazals to elegiac pantoums and riffs on the renga, Calligraphies explores a world opened up by language.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These formally ambitious and energetic poems by Hacker (A Different Distance) feature a progression of sonnet crowns, ghazals, sapphics, pantoums, and linked haiku that carry the reader through a litany of maladies. These include the pandemic, political and personal pains ("the desiccated nerves of lost desires"), the plight of refugees, the difficulty of learning Arabic, and the loneliness of quarantine. Each stanza picks up a thread from the last, the dismal emotional weather relieved by the pleasures of a good wine, an open-air market, or a veal chop. Hacker calls out nonsense as she sees it: "‘To write a sonnet is a fascist act'—/ Suggest that to the next tyre-burning goon this winter!" But she is equally hard on herself, as in the witty and perfect ghazal she calls "Myself." She dedicates poems to Karthika Nair, a French Indian poet, and Fadwa Suleiman, the late Syrian actor and civil war activist—two among the many people Hacker has worked with in Paris and elsewhere. These varied and powerful poems highlight the healing that resides in poetic collaboration and friendship across borders.
