[In the following review, West comments on Hacker's use of a wide variety of forms, rhyme schemes, and metrical patterns.]

Marilyn Hacker's previous book, Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons is a hard act to follow. A novel in verse, mostly sonnets, it had readers and reviewers gasping out their astonishment that poetry could be lively, entertaining, and, above all, not boring. Love, Death was a stunning book, indeed, but those who have been reading Hacker's work since Presentation Piece have known all along the excitement and delight she has in store for them with each book.

Going Back to the River, cannily titled, doesn't attempt to be a follow-up to anything. It does fulfill the expectations of the reader who anticipates some lively turns of phrase in a set form or two. The paired sestinas entitled “Country and Western” and “Country and Western II” begin respectively: “She will never know I cried for her / in a motel outside Memphis” and “It looks like we are the Last Unmarried / Women in Tucson. We talk about food, / drinking and mountains. They talk about babies.” Hacker gives a nod to the traditions of poetic form, country song, and a woman's place and turns them around to something rousing, living, and real. If it's real, it must be passionate, must convince. Her keen and honest erotic writing simmers in “Self”: “I felt / myself, touched / what she would touch me / to” and boils over in the steamy couplets of orgasm on an apartment house landing in “Then.”

It's good to be back among the wonderful variety of meters, schemes, and forms Hacker chooses. In Going Back to the River, Hacker uses terza rima, pantoum, sonnet sequence, syllabics, dactylics, alcaics, and even a haiku sequence. Some of her riskier technical work is in the “simpler” forms; the couplet, rhymed and unrhymed, seems to be the favored form in this book along with the rhyme schemes teacher always warned us about: abab and stanzas depending heavily on a single rhyme like aaaba. Some lines from “Late August Letter” show how Hacker uses, pushes any pattern to its fullest possibility:

Half-past ten,
the streets are silent again.
No women gossip, no men
play cards. From each house I walk
past glares chalk television—
light, canned noise
recorded sometime / where else.
No children are making noise.
Through the black trees, one dimmed star.
From their car, out-of-town boys,
holiday-
drunk, cruise for something to lay.

The poem's syllabic; a perfect count of 3, 7, 7, 7, 7 in each stanza. In the lines above, the rhymes are mostly monosyllabic, mostly full, but later in the poem she'll breeze through “mansion,” “generation,” and “Nigerian” in one stanza. The unrhymed end word consistently rhymes internally with a word in the line following. See “walk” in the first stanza rhyming “chalk” midway in the next line. Hacker keeps control over every poem, every line, every word she writes.

Because of this control, the reader is both charmed and moved by lines like the final passage of “Nights of 1964-66: The Old Reliable”:

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.

And for every poet who's winced on hearing “Poet? Well, what else do you do?” for every woman who's murmured “just a housewife,” Hacker takes on a fellow writer who disparages the easy life of those like the grant-applying poet:

And you see no excuse for poets' lives
because we're paid so mingily; that's it?
I think of “unemployed” mothers, housewives
whose work was judged equivalent to shit—

Hacker sticks up for folks; her sharp eye lets nothing escape.

The title poem of the book is foreshadowed by “Going Away from the River,” twelve poems earlier, where the speaker, saddened, explains: “Let's say: the boat left without me.” Nevertheless, she is neither static nor passive, deciding in the last stanza, “The highway spared the hill town it bypassed. / I can still get there, leave there, over land.” Placed as the penultimate poem in the book, “Going Back to the River” pulls the speaker and the reader to more than acceptance, to an embracing of what one has to do: “each one went where she had to go.” The river, powerful female symbol that figures in gospel music, personal mythology, and the written word, beckons us, and we must heed:

Go to the river, take what it offers you.
When you were young, it guarded and promised you
          that you would follow other rivers
          oceans away from a landlocked childhood.

The final stanza combines the heady mixture of hope and heartache Hacker does so well:

Life's not forever, love is precarious.
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.

Once again, Hacker's poetic wisdom simultaneously warns and reassures, lulls and incites, helps us find our own ways to the places we must go.