The history of recent literature is the history of the phrase "Only connect." Writers and readers have taken these words from E. M. Forster's Howards End as an exhortation, with "only" meaning "merely" or perhaps "exclusively." But the phrase can also be read ironically, despairingly, even interrogatively, with a rising borscht belt intonation, so that "Only connect?" becomes "Are you kidding me?"

At a time when so many writers seem to be measuring life from a considerable remove, it is invigorating to watch Marilyn Hacker glad-handing her way through the world with a warm facility. And a formalism so colloquial as to undo any readerly stereotypes. Indeed, Ms. Hacker is the best friend of anyone trying to learn the writing of formal verse. There are no ticktock rhymes in her work; her use of enjambment, slant rhyme and metrical variation produces a line so lissome and fluid that, once engaged, the reader glides on as swiftly as a child in a water slide….

As the title of Ms. Hacker's latest book suggests, Winter Numbers takes both writer and reader into middle age and the shadows that fall across every life. "Cancer Winter," for example, is the account of her own struggle with the disease. An aptly named poem, "Against Elegies," chronicles deaths both personal and impersonal, though the dying are people whose imminent extinctions are more incidental to their lives than central. One, Lidia, for example, gave up all her vices only to find out she had got AIDS from her husband:

      And Lidia, where's she
      who got her act so clean
      of rum and Salem Filters and cocaine
      after her passing husband passed it on?
      As soon as she knew
      she phoned and told her mother she had AIDS
      but no, she wouldn't come back to San Juan.
      Sipping Café con leche with dessert,
      in a blue robe, thick hair in braids,
      she beamed: her life was on the right
      track, now. But the cysts hurt
      too much to sleep through the night.

Once again Ms. Hacker's supple formalism gives backbone to ideas and images that might overwhelm a lesser poet, and once again one sees how good this poet is, so good that anyone else trying to do what she does would only look foolish.