SOURCE: Schweizer, Harold. Review of Winter Numbers. English Language Notes 35, no. 1 (September 1997): 62-6.

In the following review, Schweizer examines Hacker's treatment of death and loss, as well as her attention to the particulars of domestic life.

Marilyn Hacker confesses in an early poem, “I always / gossip in poems, mostly about myself, / hinting at inadmissible longings” (Selected Poems: 1965-1990, Norton, 1994, 16). Perhaps because they are “gossip,” Marilyn Hacker's poems are meant to be read in confidence. They are written less to be read than to be overheard, more received than read; indeed, reading any of her seven books of poems since her 1974 Presentation Piece, we become witnesses of a mostly transcontinental epistolary exchange of which we never hear the other side. The other side is Hacker's lover and partner, K. J., her daughter Iva and others mentioned in frequent epigraphs and dedications.

I think of other years here: with Marie...