Selected Poems 1965-1990

Marilyn Hacker's dark, complex poetic vision has a strange, often formal, beauty to it. Yet, when she writes in Living in the Moment: "I try to be a woman I could love./ I am probably wrong, asking/ you to stay . . ." one feels a very elemental tension between hope and fear, self-loathing and the need for love. It's a tangled inner life that Hacker is opening up for our inspection, and these are beautiful and brave poems.