Marilyn Hacker reads and writes with an ear cocked toward living language. Her diction takes in the raunchy, down-home language of street corners as well as the lyrical richness of a metric line and the punctuated earnestness of a good conversation with a friend. This authentic sense of language lends an urgent modernity to Hacker's voice. Hacker also offers a vivid, original eye for detail in the material world and tends to populate poems with complex people in uneasily characterized relationships; she then brings these skills to a tremendous gift for unanticipated rhymes and obscure poetic forms. While Hacker's poetry is formally demanding, it is also topically accessible and ultimately political.

Born in the Bronx on 27 November 1942, Hacker grew up as the only child of working-class Jewish parents, Albert Abraham Hacker (a management consultant) and Hilda Rosengarten Hacker (a teacher), who had been the first in their respective...