"Essays on Departure" is a gathering of 25 years' work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English, work from eight books, including a generous excerpt from the electrically erotic verse novel "Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons", and new work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire. Often unabashedly narrative, at once witty and elegiac, this is a poetry in open dialogue with its sources, as close at hand or as surprising as Donne , Akhmatova, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Roth or the Algerian Kateb Yacine. In the past decade, this exchange has been informed by Hacker's widely-published translations of contemporary French poets, and for the first time a selection of this work is included with her own poems. Marilyn Hacker's poetry has been - and will be - acclaimed for its keen observations of the poet's two cities, New York and Paris, its fusion of precise form and demotic language, its music, its memory, its confrontations with mortality and its stubborn delectation of life.
