New England Review

Marilyn Hacker

An Introduction to Fifteen Contemporary British Poets

from NER 41.2
Buy the issue in print or as an ebook

Hacker brings fifteen contemporary British poets to the pages of NER 41.2, with an encore of poems online.

AT A MOMENT when we are drastically separated from one another, it is a small antidote to bring some writers and readers together. It has become paradoxical how little most American readers interested in poetry know about contemporary British poets, with a few exceptions (those whose publishers are well distributed publishers in the United States). It’s even more of a paradox when we remember how, once, many American poets looked to their British counterparts for inspiration/validation/exchange: Emily Dickinson sought out every new book by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and wrote an elegy when she died; Pound, Eliot, and H.D. made London the headquarters of their different modernist projects, Pound “discovering” British poets for Harriet Monroe at Poetry, and Eliot being consequential in a re-evaluation of the Metaphysical poets, making it more likely that American and British readers both would continue to read John Donne and George Herbert. Auden, of course, traveled in the other direction. And both Sylvia Plath’s achievement and her tragedy were enacted transatlantically.

Still, the understandable desire, the project, to create and define a poetry of and from the United States was so successful that, for many readers, in the United States and in non-anglophone countries, poetry in English today is poetry from the United States: not Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, India, Australia, Jamaica. The commercial vagaries of book and magazine distribution lead to insularity, even with a common language—to read a writer or a journal on the Internet, you need to know to look for them/it. As someone with a metaphorical foot in both the United States and Great Britain (while living in neither), I had the pleasure here of bringing together a group of British poets who might not yet be known to NER readers.

As always with an editorial venture, there are other poets whose work I’d like also to have included. The Internet (and a local bookshop!) will enable you to seek them out too. Some of them are Ishion Hutchinson, Patience Agbabe, Paul Farley, Mimi Khalvati, Kei Miller, Vahni Capildeo.

British poetry today is, like American poetry, more and more “hyphenated,” with important poets established and emerging of South Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean descent, as well as transfuges from elsewhere in Europe. Many important poets are also translators, with roots or connections with another language: e.g., Hungarian for George Szirtes and Russian for Sasha Dugdale and Carol Rumens, all three of whom are featured here. Every variety of linguistic experiment is practiced, from virtuoso work in the sonnet or terza rima (that can incorporate colloquial language and dialects) to polyglot dislocations (that can incorporate them too—as well as reaching back to earlier Englishes, as Caroline Bergvall did in books riffing on Chaucer). Landscape and cityscape are backdrop to narrative or a focus in themselves, and sometimes their consideration is also ekphrastic. None of this is radically different from American, or anglophone Canadian, poetry, but these are different poets, with different histories behind them, with bodies of work whose discovery enriched this (sometimes) American reader.

 Read the poems online or order a print copy today. 

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet, 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (Pleiades, 2020) and Emmanuel Moses’s Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award, and the Argana international poetry award from the Beit as-Sh’ir/House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

July 2020

New Books by NER Authors

Support independent bookstores from home by purchasing these new titles and others from bookshop.org or from your local bookstore.

“My life stopped for two days while I read this novel. The Brightest Place in the World accomplishes what only our best art attempts… This book is a love letter to Las Vegas, the western desert, and, most of all, the mysteries of the human heart.” —Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver

From the publisher: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below and associate professor of English at Creighton University.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in many publications, including the Yale Review, Ecotone, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and Folio. His story “First Sight” appeared in NER 29.2.

The Brightest Place in the World can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

Hitchcock Blonde is a kaleidoscope of comedy and sorrow, a deep dive into the ways popular culture informs innocence and experience. Original and unforgettable.—Stephen Kuusisto author of Have Dog, Will Travel

From the publisher: A heady cocktail of sex and trauma. . . . Imagine an episodic memoir that braids together insights about Alfred Hitchcock’s movies with the narrative of a woman’s life: scenes of growing up in Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies as the daughter of a schizophrenic mother and a traveling salesman father, adolescent sexual traumas, and adult botched marriages and relationships— all refracted through the lens of ten of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic movies.

In each chapter, the narrator—an award-winning poet—trains her idiosyncratic lens on a different film and then onto the uncanny connections they conjure up from her own life. 

Sharon Dolin is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Manual for Living and Whirlwind. Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry in 2008. She is Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press and she directs Writing about Art in Barcelona. Her translations of three Gemma Gorga poems appear in NER 37.1.

Hitchcock Blonde can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“There’s the great courage of tenderness and of hope here, and Marilyn Hacker has caught all her surprising phrasing, striking juxtapositions, and subtle syntactical legerdemain in an English that rings with the music of the original, not missing a beat, or an echo, or a bell.” —Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend

From the publisher: In this stunning addition to the Pleiades Press Translation Series, rendered in Marilyn Hacker’s innovative translation from the original French, Samira Negrouche confronts a war-torn Algeria, amidst the Arab Spring, cataloguing, in her luminary genre-bending poetry, grief, exile, and revolution. . . . These are imporant poems, and Hacker gives us the gift of reading them in English for the first time in a collected volume.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019),  and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015),  and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Other translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris. Read her forward to our Contemporary British Poets series in NER 41.2.

The Olive Trees’ Jazz can be purchased at Bookshop.org or at your local independent bookstore.

“[Hegi is] a writer at the height of her powers. I can’t think of a better way to ‘endorse’ a novel than to say I will be gifting it to my book-loving friends and family—a gift, mind you, not a loan, as I want this title in my keeper bookshelf.” —Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife

From the publisher: In the summer of 1878, the Ludwig Zirkus arrives on Nordstrand in Germany, to the delight of the island’s people. But after the show, a Hundred-Year Wave roars from the Nordsee and claims three young children. Three mothers are on the beach when it happens: Lotte, whose children are lost; Sabine, a Zirkus seamstress with her grown daughter; and Tilli, just a girl herself, who will give birth later that day at St. Margaret’s Home for Pregnant Girls. As full of joy and beauty as it is of pain, and told with the luminous power that has made Ursula Hegi a beloved bestselling author for decades, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls is a shining testament to the ways in which women hold each other up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Ursula Hegi is the author of over a dozen books, including Stones from the River, Children and Fire, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Tearing the Silence, and has received more than thirty grants and awards. She teaches in the Stony Brook MFA program and lives with her family on Long Island. Her essay “I’m Searching for a Home for Unwed Girls” on her experience writing The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls appeared in NER 36.3.

Hegi’s latest book can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Sadoff evokes complex philosophical ideas with a deceptive simplicity throughout. This is an accomplished addition to his impressive body of work.”—Publishers Weekly 

From the publisher: As a perennial outsider, the speaker traverses through loneliness, consumerism, and silence, until he sees his personal history as communal. It’s a quest to honor the complexity of the mind and heart over time―a quest for justice, love, and compassion. Cultural forces and conventions―repression, prejudice, power regimes― frame feelings of powerlessness, and are explored deeply in this collection.

Ira Sadoff is an award-winning and widely anthologized poet, critic, novelist and short story writer. He has taught at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He is currently the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. His work has appeared in NER ten times, as early as 1978 and most recently in NER 31.3.

Sadoff’s latest book can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

 

More NER Author Books for April

“[Beattie’s] elegantly sculpted tale is both wrenchingly sad and ultimately enigmatic: as usual.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the publisher: A razor-sharp, deeply felt new novel–the twenty-first book by Ann Beattie–about the complicated relationship between a charismatic teacher and his students, and the secrets we keep from those we love. Written by one of our most iconic writers, known for casting a cold eye on her generation’s ambivalence and sometimes mistaken ambition, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is a keenly observed psychological study of a man who alternates between careful driving and hazardous risk taking, as he struggles to incorporate his past into the vertiginous present.

Ann Beattie has published twenty-one books and lives with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, in Maine. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read her story, “Octascope,” which appeared in NER 1.1.

A Wonderful Stroke of Luck can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. [. . .] Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” —Oliver de la Paz

From the publisher: Winner of the James Laughlin Award, Geffrey Davis’s award-winning second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the 1980s crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA, 2019), and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and New England Review in NER 39.2. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Night Angler can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Keetje Kuipers’s poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.” —Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Wade in the Water

From the publisher: A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’s decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family—it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010); The Keys to the Jail (2014); and All Its Charms (2019). Kuipers’s poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Best American Poetry, Narrative, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and New England Review in NER 39.2. Kuipers lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea, where she is a faculty member at Seattle’s Hugo House and Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

All Its Charms can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Rollins’s debut is a book of dissonance, with race and women’s bodies proving two unyielding concerns throughout this four-part work [. . .] In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins’ ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. “Memory is about the future, not the past,” she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins’ poetry seeks to challenge the status quo, engaging in a diverse, boundary-defying dialogue with an ever-present reminder of the ways race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture collide.

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as a Librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and New England Review. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Read her poem “Five and a Possible,” featured in NER 39.3.

Library of Small Catastrophes can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“It is difficult to think of a poet writing today who could surpass Marilyn Hacker’s combined formal, sonic and linguistic dexterity… Hacker’s poems reach with both hands towards an intimacy of place, language, knowledge and more.” —Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring Bulletin 2019

From the publisher: A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation
This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker’s engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman’s call for “an internationality of languages.”

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris, and has been a regular NER contributor since 1980; most recently, her translation of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen’s poetry was featured in NER 39.4 and new poetry is forthcoming this summer in 40.2.

Blazons can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

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