Poetry for Students

22 Poetry for Students

like to live with a shifting self-identity that fits no

accepted rules.

Hacker plays with form and meter in “The

Boy” though it is difficult to say whether the pat-

terns presented are significant in the context of this

poem. Most stanzas have an ABAB pattern, mean-

ing that the ending syllables of the first and third

lines of the stanza sound similar to each other, as

do those in the second and fourth lines. The ex-

ception to this pattern is the second stanza, which

has five lines and an AABAB pattern. This is also

the stanza that first throws readers into new terri-

tory; one starts to realize that there is a lot more

going on here than the original picture of a char-

acter looking out the window. Perhaps this devia-

tion from pattern, and the addition of an extra line

in this stanza, are meant to jar us as much as does

the meaning of the text.

Similarly, with no discernible pattern, Hacker

alternates lines of iambic pentameter with lines that

vary from this pattern. The first two lines of the

poem are in iambic pentameter. The third line of

the poem is also iambic pentameter, with an extra

unstressed syllable at the end of the line. The third

stanza’s second line starts out with an initial in-

version of iambic pentameter, and then goes into

iambic pentameter with another feminine ending.

Two lines down, the line that ends with “gender”

also ends with a feminine ending (the extra un-

stressed syllable), perhaps an intended irony for the

reader to unearth. These inversions and variations

on iambic pentameter may work to keep readers

from getting too comfortable or grounded as they

read the poem.

In a Ploughsharesinterview, Hacker is de-

scribed as gloriously defying “all attempts at easy

categorization.” A Publishers Weeklyreview praises

the poet’s “strength of will with an evenness of tone”

and claims that Hacker is “at her strongest when

most stark and direct.” Surely, “The Boy” is all these

things, which is entirely appropriate given its sub-

ject matter: shocking, skillfully rendered, and not

easily pinned down.

Source:Catherine Dybiec Holm, Critical Essay on “The

Boy,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.

Esther Cameron

In the following review, Cameron discusses the

themes of transience found in Hacker’s collection

Squares and Courtyards.

Marilyn Hacker’s ninth collection is written

under the aspect of transiency. Reflected in the po-

ems are the realities of a breast cancer diagnosis,

mastectomy, chemotherapy, a body no longer

whole, the fear of recurrence, the waking up to the

“scandal” of death; also the illnesses and deaths of

relatives, friends, acquaintances, strangers: other

sufferers from cancer in the poet’s circle, the vic-

tims of AIDS and drugs cared for by her lover, the

poet’s daughter’s best friend in a car crash, the

poet’s grandmother in a pedestrian accident long

ago, the victims of the Holocaust and World War

II, a vital elderly friend, a revered older poet

(Muriel Rukeyser), a homeless man whose funeral

is described. Geographical transiency also pervades

the book: the poet lives half in New York, half in

Paris, and at one point settled in Ohio, only to be

abruptly uprooted after starting a garden. The poem

that relates this event, “Tentative Gardening,” also

laments the brevity of the connection with Nadine

who had supervised the planting: “and I wonder

where and from whom I’ll learn to / put in a gar-

den.” Friends fade out in the transcontinental shuf-

fle; strangers (like the schoolgirls in “Rue de

Belleyme”) appear as vivid images, give rise to

equally vivid speculations about their lives, and

move offscreen again. One of the central poems—

“Again in the River”—shows the poet sitting be-

side the Seine; the book might have had for a motto

Heraclitus’s “All things are in flux.”

The poet both fights and celebrates the flux, as

if from a deep understanding that life and death

cannot be separated. One strategy against the flux

is, of course, form: “I will put Chaos into fourteen

lines / And keep him there,” as Millay wrote.

Hacker is one of the masters of form of the age,

and once again she proves her dexterity with the

sonnet, the crown of sonnets, terza rima, sapphics.

All the poems in the book are rhymed, except for

a set of haiku, but the rhymes are so discreetly

worked into the text that one can fail to notice them.

A particular pleasure is the way exact and off-

rhymes are blended without awkwardness, as in the

final sonnet of “Taking Leave of Zenka,” where the

rhymes are: wound/ interred/ bird/ around/ beyond/

blurred/ shirred/ friend/ son/ floor/ rudiments/more/

France/afternoon. The meter, with varying degrees

of rigidity, manages to be equally unobtrusive. The

closing of the formal circle comes each time as a

victory over the dissolving stream.

Another strategy for chaos control is the sharp

focus on the particular: “as if dailiness forestalled

change.” There is a constant invocation of “inno-

cent objects”: “a tin plate, a basement / door, a

spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,” cherries in an

outdoor market (six varieties), a dog’s coat, “spiced

pumpkin soup,” “Tissue-wrapped clementines /

The Boy

67082 _PFS_V19boyxx 013 - 027 .qxd 9/16/2003 9:24 M Page 22