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Article: Selected Poems, 1965-1990.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- November 7, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Twenty years ago, Marilyn Hacker's unique voice startled American readers when her first book of poems, Presentation Piece, won a National Book Award. Most astonishing was its doubleness, its way of being simultaneously elegant and lowdown, cranky and lyrical:
At six, when April chills our hands and feet walking downtown, we stop at Clancy's bar or Bickford's, where the part-time hustlers are, scoffing between the mailroom and the street. ("Elektra on Third Avenue")
Here was Hacker-Elektra, a beachcomber of street details, cultivated, at home with good books as with underground urban manners, and yet, para-doxically, a stranger to all she knew well.
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