Marilyn Hacker has given us six books of poetry as well as Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, a novel in verse that was put out by a new publisher who was better able to appreciate the hot chronicle of a year in lesbian romance. Hacker has always risked—through her fearless choice of subject and form. I remember hearing her read “Part of a True Story,” a poem dedicated to Margaret Delany that evokes a letter dictated by Harriet Tubman to Amelia Bloomer requesting a new bloomer suit. Tubman, who was known as “the General” even by her commanding officer after she led a successful raid up the Combahee River with a detachment of soldiers from Colonel Montgomery's command, delighted in this timely invention, long skirts having proved useless in her campaign. Hacker continues to witness with brave imagination in her latest book, and that range is why I have called the work wide and tender.

The emotional magnet at the center of Hacker's books is her lesbian identity, which she knits ferociously into form. She portrays her life as lived: in her two cities, Paris and New York; in the world of lesbian and lover; as mother to her daughter's black and Jewish origins. In form, she makes every experience an indivisible one. So it is with lesbian identity, constantly created on our own terms in forms that cannot be denied or erased. Going Back to the River is no exception, and Hacker uses the villanelle for “From Orient Point”; envelope tercets in “For K.J., Leaving and Coming Back” and the incredibly lovely “Celles”; a sestina that could make Patsy Cline proud in “Country and Western”; a pantoum for “Market Day”; and her favorite, a crown, for “Separate Lives:” the afterword to her last book. Above all in her new book there is a cherishing of friends, imagining “… we'd be old ladies on / a hill like this, where people still got old // in housedresses and navy cardigans”; shared meals; walks; deep sexual pleasures; and a loyalty born of generosity. The French have preserved a loyalty comparable to these traditions, and so her annual crossing becomes a deeper gesture toward living with care.

In the fast-paced narratives, “Nights of 1962: The River Merchant's Wife” and “Nights of 1964-1966: The Old Reliable” we see a young, vulnerable dyke stumbling into self-conscious community: “what did they make of me / on a barstool at the Sea Colony / in a paint-splattered Black Watch shirt, old khak- / i work pants, one long braid straight down my back, / … Boys' bars had dancefloors. Puerto Rican queens / in mohair sweaters, who'd worked up routines / in kitchens, line-danced to … From a Jack to a Queen!” The requisite fantasy adds humor to her first, early 60s, gay girl bar excursion: “Seduction by the French Department head / to whom I owed a paper on Genet / was what I had in mind, and I assumed / she'd know how to proceed beyond the full- / face closeup kiss on which my mind's lens zoomed / in, blanked out.” Hacker offers crisp characterizations of her particular circle of friends and the inexorable flow of the mid-60s lived on New York City's Lower East Side: “Bill and Russell were painters. Bill had been / a monk in Kyoto. Stoned, we sketched together, / till he discovered poppers and black leather:” The poem's zoom retrospect ends on a chilling note of the 90s: “… We railed against the war. / Soon, some of us bussed south with SNCC and CORE. / Soon, some of us got busted dealing drugs. / The file clerks took exams and forged ahead. / The decorators' kitchens blazed persimmon. / The secretary started kissing women, / and so did I, and my three friends are dead.”

In “Days of 1944: Three Friends” Hacker layers the friends' few lines in sequence and a devastating picture emerges: “My father and grandmother were shot. / The Germans burned our house. The furniture / was parceled out at auction, lot by lot.” The second continues, “We had to walk from Rodez to Millau. / My sister, with her patent-leather shoes / tied to a string … / … I was ten. I walked, I knew … / … My sister's shoes shone, two / crystals. I'd left my fossil box at home. / But that was nothing. Just what we lived through.” Last, she gives us her own relative innocence, her omissions marking her powerlessness over the destruction of her kind: “I know the countries, not the counties or / towns my grandparents left—whose other Jews / the fire took, while you lived, I played, at war.”

Friends have been lost, some dead, and she marks the changes, small and large: the sober/sad perspective on her last lover, and the “owned certainty; perpetual surprise” that has arrived with the mature, shared love of “For K.J., Leaving and Coming Back.” Hacker's private negotiations with her heart have grown to include an acceptance of her past and changing selves as well as of the world and those she loves. As she says in the last lines of the title poem, “Wherever I live, let me come home to you / as you are, I as I am, where you / meet me and walk with me to the river.”