Squares and Courtyards: Poems.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

I give my strongest recommendation to Marilyn Hacker's Squares and Courtyards: Poems (Norton, 2000). Elegant in form, casual and observational in style, these poems wrap themselves around large themes: death, friendship, parents' and children, Nazism, sex, nature, empire.

As in her last collection, Winter Numbers (Norton, 1994), Hacker here contends with breast cancer--her own and that of her friends.

In "Grief," she writes about consoling her twenty-year-old daughter after her best friend dies in a car accident. And she recognizes the fear her daughter must have that her mother ("Chemo has let me live / so far") and father (who only by "prudence or miracle" remains seronegative) will soon be taken from her.

Hacker, who lives part of the year in Paris and the other part in Manhattan, contends with her dual localities in "Paragraphs from a Daybook," the forty-page poem that concludes this collection. As a U.S. citizen in France, she...