Desesperanto : poems, 1999-2002 / Marilyn Hacker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hacker, Marilyn, 1942-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

122 ; 22 pages cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton, [2003]

Summary:

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir, meaning "to lose heart." Desesperanto, then, is a universal language of despair -- despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

Contents:

Elegy for a Soldier 15

Vendanges

Crepuscule with Muriel 23

Days of 1999 25

Embittered Elegy 26

English 182 28

Days of 1967 30

A Farewell to the Finland Woman 32

Ghazal on Half a Line by Adrienne Rich 36

Omelette 37

Maggy Calhoun 39

French Food 40

Alto Solo 41

Vendanges 44.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0393054187

OCLC:

51093317