Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Marilyn Hacker has a fine eye for detail which gives her poems an immediacy and presence that pulls the reader into them:

What I remember of the seventies
in London: carpeted hallway stairs, red bars
of an electric fire, neat whiskey
downed in chilly book-lined interiors;
grime-paned French doors opening out on
a Hampstead garden greened with daily rain;

     It’s engaging writing, rhythmically sound, and with a nicely direct way of telling stories, which is what Hacker does. Her poems are always about something real and identifiable and not simply explorations of personal feelings. Other people figure strongly in them and through the people a powerful sense of history is expressed, especially the kind of history one can run up against in European cities. Hacker knows what happened in the dark days of the 30s and 40s, and living in Paris she can still encounter those days. Having lunch with a friend she finds herself enthusing about a film she’s seen, a son’s homage to his mother who was a survivor of the concentration camps. The poem captures the atmosphere in the restaurant, the food on the plates, the civilised conversation. And then:

Our plates were cleared. With habitual
                                                     diffidence
she handed a new manuscript to me
and took (to the Ladies) momentary leave.
I turned a page and read the dedication
to her father, who died at Bergen-Belsen.

     The poems move from Paris to New York and elsewhere and Hacker encounters the dropouts, the drugged, and the near-dead. Death, in fact, makes an appearance more than once as friends fade away and the scourges of cancer and AIDS take their toll. The poet’s own encounter with chemotherapy is mentioned, though not brought to the fore, and it clearly colours her views. You notice death more as you get older and your own mortality is made obvious to you.

     This is a powerful book, wonderfully readable and full of poems that can touch the mind and heart and make the reader want to know more. And it is well-written, with a technique that is never obvious but nonetheless adds to the impact of what is being said.