SOURCE: "Chiliastic Sapphic," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 259, No. 15, November 7, 1994, pp. 548-52.

[Schulman is an American educator, writer, poet, and critic. In the following excerpt, she favorably assesses the poetic style and themes of Winter Numbers.]

Marilyn Hacker's seventh book, Winter Numbers, strikes me as her strongest to date. From the beginning, she has used ironic antitheses, often yoking disparate entities ("Richter plays Bach. My baby daughter plays / with a Gauloise pack"; "Geographer"). Here, to darker ends, she sees discordances in a torn culture.

In "Chiliastic Sapphics," a new poem that links daily activity with world slaughter, the poet sits in her Paris apartment reading of tanks, aircraft carriers and suicide squadrons. Intermittently, she hears the honk of a wedding car, and, on a cassette, nuns singing the Kyrie. In "Street Scenes II," she writes of contradictions in her own neighborhood near the Marais, the Jewish quarter...