In the following essay, Keller examines Hacker's use of formalist verse in a way that resists the stereotypical patriarchal gender politics generally associated with formalism.
In the following review, West praises Hacker's treatment of personal heroics, calling Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons “wise, funny, brave, and beautifully written.”
[Schulman is an American educator, writer, poet, and critic. In the following excerpt, she favorably assesses the poetic style and themes of Winter Numbers.]
[Taking Notice] is an impressive work of art, and Marilyn Hacker is an artist with a sharp, crystalline mind. She is never fashionable—and poetry these days is too too dangerously a world in which fashion seems to fascinate…. Technically she is a superb artisan. This was true in her first two books and is now more true than ever. Probably the other most important characteristic she possesses as a writer is a discerning eye for truth, however unpleasant, however against the grain, however out o...
It is no wonder that Marilyn Hacker's Presentation Piece was greeted with such éclat—and swept several prizes—a half dozen years ago. At a time when so many of her more touted peers had settled for the studied simplicities of workshop murk, she knew how much more difficult it is to be precise than profound. And her precision was manifest, first, in her prosody. She had a prodigious talent for verse, and lavished it with gusto and flair: the straw of experience was woven, as if ov...
In the following excerpt, Holland reviews Separations, praising the poet's technique but criticizing the overall dreariness and pessimism of her verses.
In the following excerpt, Howard reviews Presentation Piece, maintaining that the volume should be read as a whole in order to appreciate the connections Hacker makes between individual poems through the use of repeated images.
In the following excerpt, Stitt reviews Assumptions, claiming that the “intentionally outrageous confessions” of the events of Hacker's own life are less effective than the poems about other people, which Stitt believes are among her best.
Thematically, the poems in Taking Notice, by Marilyn Hacker, betray their imprisonment in the material present. Although there is much talk about the merging of affectionate bodies and the approach to others as objects of adoration and desire, the poems do not imitate the transport to which they frequently refer. Neither are they meditations at one remove from the experience; the mood of the volume is one of manic vigilance before the monotony of the present. The most characteristic rhetorical device is the...
With Taking Notice …, Marilyn Hacker has written what constitutes the last volume in a trilogy. Her concerns are basically the same—esthetic and sexual confrontation—as they were in Presentation Piece and Separations. It is their sequence that swells a progress. Their titles, effectively, speak for themselves. The first book is an introduction to and exploration of relationships, friendly and familial; the second centers on the difficulty and eventual disintegration of a long-distance m...
[In the following excerpt, Kirby favorably assesses Winter Numbers, noting Hacker's "fluid" poetic style and her ability to handle ideas about death and middle age.]
["Taking Notice"] is the work of a highly skilled, conscious artisan. Several poems are dedicated to other writers, but [Marilyn Hacker's] daughter also receives some witty, celebratory attention. Miss Hacker directly discusses the rigors and discipline of writing, but she often addresses friends in a seemingly offhanded way, and some poems have a quotidian, even improvised, quality. One section of the book is called "Occasions," but Miss Hacker is never involved in merely...
