[In the following excerpt, Howard reviews Presentation Piece, maintaining that the volume should be read as a whole in order to appreciate the connections Hacker makes between individual poems through the use of repeated images.]

Marilyn Hacker shares with Eiseley a certain tough-mindedness, but her concerns are narrower, her tone much harsher. She is a poet of emerging womanhood and the decaying American city. Her lines have a nervous intensity and a taut, glutted texture expressive of their subject:

Two bulldykes teased an acrid teenage whore
pinioned with dexies to the lobby door
and wondered if distinction could be made
among us, who was trick and who was trade.

“the navigators”

In this and other poems Miss Hacker fuses conventional stanzaic form with squalid urban imagery and with a diction that is both fastidious and rich with slang. The effect is often witty, sometimes caustic:

                                        I, for one, have had a bellyful
of giving reassurances and obvious
advice with scrambled eggs and cereal;
then bad debts, broken dates, and lecherous
onanistic dreams of estival
nights when some high-strung, well-hung, penurious
boy, not knowing what he'd get, could be more generous.

“she bitches about boys”

Miss Hacker's dense line makes for interest and sometimes high adventure; but it also makes for strain and for an opacity which at times seems willful. More than most first volumes, Presentation Piece demands to be read in its entirety, since the poems reflect on one another, and with repeated readings a vocabulary of images begins to emerge. Over and again one encounters images of the body, especially the tongue; of salt upon the tongue; of the sea, cliffs, a beach; of lovers awakening. And it becomes apparent that the poet is attempting to formulate, in these and related images, a language of instinct and feeling—of a woman's bodily awareness—and to express the body's longings, including its “inadmissible longings”, as they are shaped and repressed in personal relationships. That such a language has yet to be created, or yet to be discovered, is both exhilarating and a cause for anguish:

Every day our bodies separate,
exploded torn and dazed.
Not understanding what we celebrate
we grope through languages and hesitate
and touch each other, speechless and amazed;
and every day our bodies separate
us farther from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,
not understanding what we celebrate
when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.

“villanelle”

The tone of incipient despair is echoed throughout this volume, which speaks often of “distances” and “exile”. These poems grope not only through languages but also through forms, as though nothing quite sufficed to express the pain of isolation. About half of the poems employ traditional forms: sonnets, villanelles, sestinas. When these pieces succeed, as does a poem entitled “Forage Sestina,” they express powerful emotions powerfully restrained; and they seem to confirm the traditional forms. Often, however, the sonnets and sestinas fall victim to artifice and do not confirm much of anything. Whatever their origin might have been, they read like formal exercises. On the whole, the poems in freer forms are more convincing. If, like the shrill, unreadable “Elegy” for Janis Joplin, they sometimes fail, it is not for lack of insight or feeling but for lack of the restraint so evident in the more traditional pieces. The volume includes two ambitious sequences: a crown of sonnets on childbirth and a ten-poem sequence entitled “The Navigators,” which explores a triangular love-relationship in painful detail. The latter sequence demands and rewards close reading. …