Winter Numbers.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

This is the seventh volume of poems by Marilyn Hacker, who for the last few years was the editor--and a brilliant one at that--of The Kenyon Review. (It was she who brought Campo to my attention). But last summer she was cashiered, she told The Advocate, suspecting that her lesbian orientation and radical politics were too much for that tightly buttoned magazine--another brave moment in publishing,

Death stalks this book. The opening long poem, "Against Elegies," sets the tone from the very first lines:

James has cancer. Catherine has cancer.

Melvin has AIDS.

Whom will I call, and get no answer?

Halfway through the poem, Hacker mentions "the day I meet/the lump in my breast," and her cancer will return throughout the book. Intensely personal, this opening poem and others in the collection also reflect on the crimes of this century,

in which we made death humanly obscene

Soweto El Salvador Kurdistan

Armenia Shatila Baghdad Hanoi

Auschwitz. Each one, unique as our lives

are,

taints what's left with complicity,

makes everyone living a survivor

who will, or won't bear witness for the

dead.

In "Elysian Fields," she points out the gap between rich and poor in America. Set in an upscale cafe in Manhattan, the poem describes how "cappuccino drinkers" watch the poor from the comfort of the coffee house.

Lush with rhymes and modified traditional forms, Hacker's poetry echoes and reverberates. And her sense of humor is refined, as in the sendoff she gives her students in "Groves of Academe," who want to write poems for Vanity Fair. Or take this throwaway update of Yeats: "The Left lacks all conviction, and the Right--capitalism with a human face?"

Hacker writes tenderly of her lesbian lovers, and of...