SOURCE: Juhasz, Suzanne. “In the Fullness of the Poet's Time.” Lesbian Review of Books 2, no. 1 (31 October 1995): 16.

In the following excerpt, Juhasz traces the development of Hacker's poetry over the 25 years covered in Selected Poems: 1965-1990.

Marilyn Hacker is one of our premier lesbian poets. That fact is clearly brought home with the publication of her Selected Poems: 1965-1990. I have always admired her for her linguistic brilliance, largely derived from the striking conjunction of conventional prosody with decidedly unconventional, decidedly vernacular idiom. Marilyn Hacker's poetry rhymes. It is not a free, untrammeled expression of feelings; rather, it is as ordered—and playful—as only structured verse can be. The choice to contain the contemporary and colloquial within verse forms as old-fashioned, nay unfashionable, as the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, and pantoum results in a lively interplay between the rigorous and the rebellious, the controlled and the haphazard. Hacker can...