MARILYN HACKER
Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
W.W.Norton and Co. £16.95

MARY BAINE CAMPBELL
Trouble
Carnegie Mellon University Press £8.10

The word Desesperanto, the title of Marilyn Hacker’s new book, is a fine creation in itself. Not esperanto, the hoped-for new universal language, and not quite désespoir, despair, either, it hovers elusively above both possibilities — and in this it resembles many of Hacker’s poems, which are often very aware of despair — at ageing, at painful memories, at the loss or decline of friends and lovers — and yet at the same time they contradict despair by an extraordinarily confident and playful use of language and metre.

David Constantine, in a thoughtful review of her previous collection, Squares and Courtyards, in Poetry London two years ago, focused on the problem for a poet of using as subject-matter the masses of miscellaneous detail that make up everyday life. That problem remains, but I shall start from the other side and draw attention first to Hacker’s metrical skill.

Comparatively few poets in English have used the classical alcaic stanza. Tennyson made an impressive attempt at it, in a sonorous exercise addressed to Milton: ‘O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies, / O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity...’; and Auden’s elegy for Sigmund Freud follows the alcaic syllable-count (though not its rhythm). It is extremely difficult to get right in English, particularly because the first three lines begin with a strong single syllable before the first full foot (a trochee). To keep this up for long would be intolerably artificial, but look how Hacker does it in a poem called ‘Omelette’:

First, chop an onion and sauté it separately
in melted butter, unsalted, preferably.
Add mushrooms (add girolles in autumn)
Stir until golden and gently wilted.

Then break the eggs as neatly as possible,
crack! on the copper lip of the mixing bowl....

You might think that such a playful opening could only lead to a rather slight poem. In fact, making the omelette takes her mind back to former omelettes, made by gay men at post-hangover brunches when Hacker was young. That in turn leads her to think of Aids which has killed off so many of her friends since. Her mind returns to the present omelette (‘Up, flame, and push the edges in carefully’) and then skids off again, this time to a girlfriend known thirty years later, in the brave world of feminism and women’s bookshops — and thence to the realization that that world too has passed, the bookshop is now just ‘one more Left Bank restaurant’. The final stanza runs:

With (you’ve been using it all along) a wood
spatula, flip one half of the omelette
    over the girolle-garnished other.
    Eat it with somebody you’ll remember.

It’s a moving portrait of ageing, alert in the present, besieged by memories.

Another piece of splendid formal virtuosity is a ‘Ghazal on Half a Line by Adrienne Rich’, where Hacker rhymes no fewer than twelve times on the last four syllables of ‘In a familiar town, she waits for certain letters’. This extremely demanding formal requirement liberates her to meditate on the pleasures, risks, unexpected freedoms that letters involve. The tension created in the reader, waiting to see how she will manage the demands of the form, couplet after couplet, has an almost comic effect, allowing poignant things to be said without self-pity. Hacker concludes:

Ex-lovers who won’t lie down naked again
still permit themselves to flirt in letters.

What does Anonymous compose, unsigned
at night, after she draws the curtain? Letters.

Such virtuoso performance emphasizes the function of form in holding, while unveiling, emotion. One can’t really be overwhelmed by feeling while one is imposing such a tight and delicate discipline upon it.

In less showy pieces, Hacker steps up the emotional voltage. ‘Grief’ is in sapphics:

Grief daubs kohl on middle-aged burning eyelids.
Grief drives miles not noticing if the highway
runs beside an ocean, abandoned buildings
or blackened wheatfields

In her memorial to Karig Sára (alcaics again), she uses her formal discipline to organise a mass of information:

Interned in ‘53 as a Trotskyist
you underwent a double mastectomy
    for ‘lumpy breasts’; chloroform was the
    one anesthetic used in the gulag.

Pain wasn’t something you ever dwelled upon.
Most probably, your breasts weren’t cancerous —
    Tubercular and convalescent
    you were excused from the mines and road work.

(‘A Farewell to the Finland Woman’)

The regular form allows these appalling facts to be presented briskly and with good manners.

Constantine comments that a poet who depends so much on the accidental circumstances of life for material ‘runs the risk of letting all and sundry things into his poems, merely because they happened’. This is indeed a risk, and Hacker probably falls into it from time to time. But to my mind, much of the power of her work springs from the contrast between touchingly real human beings, with their hopes and loves and easily-derailed lives, and the casual, often squalid, sometimes cruel, but always rivettingly particular circumstances in which these lives are lived out.

Hacker is, I think, much influenced by Auden, who as he got older also developed a deeply kindly and irreverent gaze, with no lack of awareness of tragedy.

In ‘Road Work’, a poem Auden might almost have written himself, Hacker describes wonderfully an unexpected moment of joy, which overtook her in Paris one rainy day in the rue Amelot. (She not only tells us the name of the street, but also the name of the adjacent metro station, and of her upstairs neighbour, and nearly gives us the address of the neighbour’s son, who lives ‘above the fromagerie / in the rue St Antoine’. All these particulars are not at all boring, to my mind, because they combine to give us a sense of the uniqueness and fragility of every life.) With her acute antennae for loss and diminishment, Hacker is certainly not one to underestimate the pain there is, in her and in the people around her, but her poem ends:

Grief’s radical subtraction
enacted, may there be
some countersurge, reaction
of self-sufficient joy
at a rainy intersection.

Hacker speaks out of a life-time of experience with great articulateness, deep feeling, and a rich variety of technical resources. She is a poet you can trust yourself to.

Mary Baine Campbell presents very differently. (Her title, Trouble, I read as in ‘troubled’.) She puts us into a realm of painful and conflicted experience, sometimes bitterly angry or wrenchingly sad, and what lies behind these emotions is often obscure, sometimes to the poet perhaps as well as to the reader.

I like best her more substantial poems, in which emotion is given at least some context. Less good pieces can simply present moods of unexplained anguish, such as ‘Evening Light 1992’: ‘...The TV’s on, / The cars outside are rushing to their dooms, / One of the children playing / In the street will grow to be / A murderer, and murder you. // Or murder me, and rightly so.’ Something must be going on, to create such dread and guilt, but the reader is left guessing unprofitably.

At other times, however, these troubled moods generate considerable beauty. In ‘The Singer’, Campbell describes hearing a woman sing, or perhaps speak, with whom ‘you’ are in some very intense relationship:

Drenched in the sight of the singer it’s hard
To take notes on notes, and you wore your own
Best dress to be here, being her, not meaning
What she means but receiving the love
You give her from your seat in the balcony
Above her. It’s all so beautiful and so are you
With your pupils wide open like doorways
And the singer inside them, beckoning.

That brilliantly conveys a sort of intoxicated sense of connection, and I felt a bit churlish in being disappointed when the perception dwindled into an all-too-familiar version of ‘reality’:

                                           ...Although
The occasion for so much silk,
She sounds in some phrases like real birds
Hungry and small out there, and wondering
Whether they’ll live.

End of section. The next section, which starts immediately afterwards, begins:

A bird who wishes to sing is starving, or warning
Or getting directions....

So even in this rich poem, lack and anxiety are abruptly given a disturbing but unexplained priority. In ‘To the Editor’, something similar occurs. The poem is in the form of a letter responding to an article which claimed ‘the Flag’ is the only sacred thing in America, and suggested that flag-burners could make their point just as well in words. This provokes a satirical response in the letter-writer. If words are equal to the sacred flag, why not just ‘run a poster up the flagpole / And wait to see who salutes’? A would-be flag-burner herself, she declares her intention to burn the words that are equivalent to the flag. She will burn the Constitution! the Declaration of Independence! the text of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’!

So far, this is engaging and funny, and it invites one to think about what the American flag means to its admirers. But the poem now changes from satire and modulates suddenly into something altogether different:

I haven’t put my torch to a temple yet...
...Burning a temple’s just arson: I want
To desecrate something, really desecrate it
Top to bottom, inside and out
I want to desecrate it until it’s white hot
Till it begs me to stop, till it flags, till it folds up
Like a flower when the nuclear sun goes down
At last and in the peace of the night
Real lovers turn to each other, flame
To shining flame.

End of poem. What has happened? The satirist has metamorphosed into someone else, perhaps a hurt and outraged woman who longs to get her own back, and longs too to believe love will somehow still be possible after all that rage has been expressed. But nothing in the earlier part of the poem has prepared us for this person, who seems to erupt out of private obsession and hi-jack the poem — movingly, no doubt. The letter, which began Dear Sir, remains unsigned.

One of the best pieces here, ‘Making Believe’, speaks of her rage directly. It is like nothing in nature, she says: ‘If nature were the ground / My feet would not have broken’:

Someone might say, even you, this rage is my nature.
It is not. My nature is, like yours, a stream...
...I am nothing like the body that pulls its bones apart
In sleep or at the desk and cannot be calmed
Because it requires murder: the impossible.

Paradoxically, this ‘make-believe’ that her rage is not part of her nature comes across truer and more authentic than the poems in which she expresses rage full-on, or by way of sarcasm (‘Furs’, ‘Back to Nature’).

It is clear that Campbell is a gifted writer, but where Hacker plies us with circumstantial detail, perhaps more than we always need, Campbell keeps the reader guessing: what emotions are these? Why are they there? One could defend this by saying that it’s just being true to the nature of emotion, which often does in reality precede our knowing what it’s about, but if so the reader is in a predicament. Why should we be persuaded by these emotions? We might find we’d been suckered by a sales-pitch, a con-trick, a piece of sentimentality...

Taking the collection as a whole, I don’t for one moment believe this to be the case. And I shouldn’t imply she leaves us wholly without clues. Towards the end, in a poem called ‘The Wake’, she speaks in passing of her mother:

                             ...who also went
Where she could not be touched
Or spoken to.

In ‘To Autumn’, meditating on Keats’s poem, she writes:

                      ... I dreamed a little girl
Monkey was hanging upside down
From a nest in the eaves. She dropped
Out of sight, into empty space;
She is far away now, or I am....

...There is no one there on the granary floor.
There is no one watching by the cider press.

D.M. Black’s Collected Poems 1964-87 (Polygon) was published in 1991, and his translations of Goethe have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London and other journals. His website is www.dmblack.co.uk.

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