SOURCE: "A Formal Life: Marilyn Hacker's Deep Structure," in VLS, No. 132, February, 1995, p. 25.

[In the following excerpt, Joseph favorably reviews Winter Numbers, focusing on the "Cancer Winter" sonnets.]

[In Hacker's new book, Winter Numbers], the central motifs of her poetry—the inner and outer furies of the physical world, and the ways in which poetry embodies them—revolve around, simultaneously, the destruction of one's own body and that of the body politic. Hacker's voices are more mellifluously startling and alive than ever. Positing that "sound more than sense determines words I choose, / invention mutes intention," the book's dialogical contentions take you right in. Hacker has been doing this so well, and for so long, that you hardly realize what you're reading is major work. Especially powerful is the sonnet sequence, "Cancer Winter"—"Syllables shaped around the darkening day's / contours." The textured compression of physical detail, the sensual world...