[In the following review, Oles discusses Hacker's treatment of mother/daughter relationships in her poetry collection Assumptions.]

Marilyn Hacker's intelligence, wit, passion and craft have delighted her readers ever since Presentation Piece announced her arrival a decade ago. Assumptions, her fourth book, moves us with new strength and nerve. Hacker continues to explore the forms, powers and attributes a woman can assume, searching her past as the poems move from personal to mythic expressions of a woman's progress toward herself.

The personal tone of her work is clearest in the section of the book called “Inheritances,” where the pain of the past is revisited through the poet's relationship with her mother, for example, in this sonnet:

We shopped for dresses which were always wrong: sweatshop approximations of the leanlined girls' wear I studied in Seventeen. The armholes pinched, the belt didn't belong, the skirt drooped forward (I'd be told at school). Our odd-lot bargains deformed the image, but she and I loved Saturday rummage. One day she listed outside Loehmann's. Drool wet chin. Stumbling, she screamed at me. Dropping our parcels on the pavement, she fell in what looked like a fit. I guessed: insulin. The cop said, “Drunk,” and called an ambulance while she cursed me and slapped away my hands. When I need a mother, I still go shopping.

(“Fourteen”)

Another poem, “Mother,” gives us some biographical facts while making it clear that what Hacker doesn't know about her mother is almost more significant than what she does. In part it's that ignorance that forces her to reconsider the past. Her own daughter, Iva, helps precipitate the poet's journey back, asking questions about her black Christian and white Jewish immigrant forebears. The stories must be told, must be heard.

Hacker sees her mother, herself and Iva in relation to one another. Her recollected distance from her mother is now measured against what her own daughter may feel for her. In “Towards Autumn,” she writes, “I missed the words to make friends with my mother,” and “Befriend / yourself: I couldn't have known to tell my mother / that, unless I'd learned it for myself. / Until I do.” The older and younger generations skewer Hacker between them in many of these poems, creating a tension that strengthens and enlarges them beyond those addressed to Iva in her third book, Taking Notice.

Many mothers are celebrated in this book, but accepting her own, with all the forgiveness that implies, is Hacker's most difficult and liberating assumption. We've been prepared for such a pardon by these lines from the “Regent's Park Sonnets,” in Taking Notice:

It was not my mother or my daughter who did me in. Women have been betrayed by history, which ignores us, which we made like anyone, with work and words, slaughter and silver.

Now, in Assumptions, come the poems that forgive.

Hacker moves out of the familial house of the first section in a group of thirteen sonnets called “Open Windows.” Speaking both to herself and to a lover, she airs such subjects as freedom and solitude, the roles of lover and mother, desire and satisfaction, justice and the disinherited.

Her tone shifts from intimacy and vulnerability to irony and vulnerability in “Graffiti from the Gare Saint-Manque,” a 170-line variation on the ballade supreme which wryly considers the life of a lesbian: “The sin we are / beset by is despair.” The poem leaps borders and centuries; as in Hacker's earlier work, travel is an outward expression of the interior journey of the soul or libido. Like the title of the book, Assumptions, the diction of this poem rings Catholic bells: “Saint,” “communicants,” “sin,” “celebrants,” “salvation,” “nuns.” Hacker suggests the creation of a new faith for unbelievers in the old.

If, in the first section, the poet retrieves and invents her mother so that she and her daughter can understand and live their own lives, she appropriates a myth for a similar purpose in “The Snow Queen,” a narrative sequence of eight poems. Again the work centers on mothers and daughters: the Robber Woman and the Robber Girl; the Snow Queen and her daughters; and Gerda, who must find other women to mother her. While in Hans Christian Andersen's tale Gerda's quest is for Kay, her male friend lured away by the Snow Queen, in Hacker's version he is only a pretext. Her real search is for herself. In “Gerda in the Eyrie,” Gerda addresses the Robber Girl: “I almost love you. I've wanted to be you / all my life. You are asleep in the straw / with my story.” In contrast to the Robber Girl, Gerda has inhabited a tiny world, by her own assent: “But I was happy where I was … I sat still.” In the poem's final image, Gerda merges with her alter ego, suggesting the possibility of change.

“The Snow Queen” section closes with a prose poem, an encomium to “bad old ladies,” who greet age with gusto on their own terms and are rewarded when their “daughters slog across the icecap to get drunk” with them. This image leads to the collection's final poem, a homage to the pet's “mothers,” literary and historical.

That poem, “Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found,” balances the earlier “Graffiti” in form and tone, finally lightening the book. While any archness in both poems can be read as protective, this is perhaps not the best note for Assumptions to end on. But since the poet's shaping of the book has been so deliberate, we must conclude the effect is intended. Hacker's strengths have always been most impressive in sequences and long poems—large structures that provide ample space for the play of her range. While no sequence in Assumptions has the intensity of the title poem in Taking Notice, the whole volume reads more like a single poem.

The formal dexterity we expect from Hacker animates Assumptions. Whereas Adrienne Rich (who has inspired and emboldened her) discarded the formalism of her earlier poems, Hacker continues to explore a multiplicity of forms, “venerable vessels for subversive use.” Hacker's work is political, looking toward a new order of things. Hence, when she writes in forms associated with the primarily male poets canonized by literary history, it is as if she were slipping, in broad daylight, into a well-guarded preserve. She uses the decorous sonnet, sestina and villanelle to contain a vernacular, often racy speech. Playing against formal conventions and the surrounding language of the poems are lines like “Unsaintly ordinary female queers” and “(whenever I'm horny, I first think I'm / hungry)” and “I wish I had my knife. I bet she'll drop / it and lose it, or give it to that drip / and never use it for herself. Piss on her!” In another poet, Hacker's formalism may seem imitative or passe. Her subject and emotional range make it a claim to ownership.

In Assumptions, her most moving and personal book to date, Hacker reconciles all manner of polarities. More than ever, her poems make us forget to admire their technical brilliance. They deepen and expand our conception of what it is to be a woman.