Marilyn Hacker is one of America’s most distinguished poets, critics, and translators. Her latest volume of poems, Transitions: New and Selected Sonnets (Milkweed Editions), spans half a century and includes roughly two hundred thirty sonnets—a remarkable achievement in an era when even a chapbook of formal poetry can seem too daring, or too passé, to publish. Rather than being a stunt meant to showcase the poet’s technical dexterity, however, the collection invites sustained attention, rewarding readers with meditations on desire and friendship, cities and languages, food and art, love and loss. There are café poems, poems written in hospitals and apartment lofts, and poems with the writer perched at a window, looking out. While Hacker’s voice has remained remarkably consistent over decades, she is often most compelling when writing from a certain distance, when coolly assessing the wreckage after a breakup or reflecting on the destruction wrought by war or serious illness. This is a poetics of divergence: of the space between a life that might have been and the life that is.
A persistent sense of misgiving runs through Hacker’s work, and a solitary, existential longing is evident in several of the new sonnets that open the collection. One of the first poems in the book, “Untitled” (written in memory of Diana Senior), offers a striking example:
She walked into our various young lives
(did we know we were young?), a breeze from elsewhere,
or several elsewheres, and the tenements
we camped in suddenly seemed impermanent—
blessedly. There were maps of a future:
libraries, bridges, cities of stone and gold.
She didn’t want to be an ambassador
or an interpreter, she was a scholar,
the elegance of her mind masked by the awe
her face, despite her modest self, inspired.
Lives became complicated; when I saw
her next, she was single, with a two-year-old.
I was in her city, lost, foreign, crass.
We aged. She died. What becomes of the past?
The poem is built on the rhetoric of contrast: here and elsewhere, opulence and poverty, rootedness and nomadism, past and future, youth and old age. These are the defining contrasts in Hacker’s oeuvre more broadly, but perhaps the most important one in this poem is the contrast between the living and the dead.
Lives became complicated; when I saw
her next, she was single, with a two-year-old.
I was in her city, lost, foreign, crass.
We aged. She died. What becomes of the past?
Half a lifetime collapses into the poem’s final quatrain. How long, exactly, were the speaker and Diana apart? How many “elsewheres” followed their separation? What becomes of the narrative of their relationship now that one half is gone? Hacker doesn’t tell us, and that haunting reticence is part of the poem’s power.
A similar sense of displacement appears in “Transitions,” a seven-sonnet sequence that concludes the volume’s first section and gives the book its title. In the fourth sonnet—one of the most powerful in the collection—the speaker reflects on what it means to return to a city once known and loved:
Coffee, a croissant. Possibility
of morning, possibility of heat
and stasis: no rain, bad back, leaden feet.
Sans famille, sans patrie, presque sans abri,
neither an exile nor a refugee.
One street doesn’t mean more than the next street.
I like the bookshop, but no known-named merchant’s greet-
ing starts my day: grocer, boulangerie,
on my old street, or months in Montpeyroux.
“Ya ukhti,” maybe, but not family.
Nobody asks, “What are you going through?”
or plans some trivial delight with me.
If I died in a hotel room, who would care?
My daily limitations are—what’s there.
While one could quibble with the awkward break on “greeting,” this poem is a fine example of Hacker’s polyglot and cosmopolitan sensibility. As with “Untitled,” the sonnet begins with the promise of possibility (the enjambment in the first line suggests that the day might develop unpredictably), yet oppressive weather and physical handicaps—a bad back, leaden feet—quickly assert themselves. The speaker positions herself as a person without a family or country, returning to her former city as an estranged traveler or a temporary guest. No longer the place she once knew, the city’s lost its luster, and with it, the potential for romance or genuine human connection. The poem’s repeating rhyme reinforces this sense of stagnation, mirroring the speaker’s emotional state as she revisits old stomping grounds. By the end, imagination yields to reality, and even the poet’s death would likely go unnoticed.
Death and dying reoccur frequently throughout Transitions, but Hacker’s most urgent exploration of mortality appears in the fourteen-sonnet sequence titled “Cancer Winter,” which chronicles the aftermath of a mastectomy:
I had “breasts like a twenty-five-year-old,”
and that was why, although a mammogram
was done the day of my year-end exam
in which the doctor found the lump, it told
her nothing: small, firm, dense breasts have and hold
their dirty secrets till their secrets damn
them. Out of the operating room
the tumor was delivered, sectioned, cold-
packed, pickled, to demonstrate to residents
an infiltrative ductal carcinoma
(with others of its kind). I’ve one small, dense
firm breast left, and cell-killer pills so no more
killer cells grow, no eggs drop. To survive
my body stops dreaming it’s twenty-five.
Although the clinical language in this poem risks distancing the reader from the immediacy of the moment, it is also a strength, forcing us to confront the stark realities of illness without sentimentality. The speaker’s tumor has been sectioned and cold packed like a piece of meat, and now serves as a generic specimen for medical instruction. Her attractive, youthful breasts—once something to be proud of—are now regarded as vessels that might harbor the means of bodily destruction. Dreams, too, are suspect, and Hacker implies that youthful aspirations may be part of the problem. Even more troubling, the therapeutic pills that the speaker takes to keep the cancer at bay undermine the very mechanism that ensures her survival—the growth of new cells. In a later sonnet from the sequence, Hacker continues her analysis of the body, this time from a different angle:
No body stops dreaming it’s twenty-five,
or twelve, or ten, when what is possible’s
a long road poplars curtain against loss, able
to swim the river, hike the culvert, drive . . .
The poem moves restlessly through enjambed lines, tracing the passage from childhood to adulthood and finally into old age. Roads close. Invisible entropies accumulate. Landscapes and memories decay. Yet, in the spirit of Dylan Thomas, the poem ends with a monosyllabic plea that resists resignation: “I don’t know how to die yet. Let me live.”
Marilyn Hacker’s Transitions: New and Selected Sonnets stands as an affirmation of life even amid disillusionment and loss. Fifty years of writing bear witness to her keen perception, moral courage, and mastery of craft. Against forces that might silence many—social and geographic alienation, cancer, and the ravages of time—she continues to speak in lines that are at once measured and deeply felt. The result is not merely a testament to resilience, but a body of work that finds, within the strictures of the sonnet form, a way to endure.
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