Poetry: Going Back to the River

Overview

"Going Back to the River" gathers poems that span Marilyn Hacker's development as a lyric poet attentive to both private feeling and public life. The volume blends newly written work with selections from the previous fifteen years, mapping a career that moves between formal discipline and conversational intimacy. The title image, returning to a river, signals recurrent preoccupations with memory, return, and the slow movement of time.

Themes

Personal growth appears as a persistent current, with poems marking transitions in identity, love, and loss. Relationships are examined with forensic clarity, whether in the shape of romantic entanglements or the network of friendships that sustain survival. Social justice is present not as topical sermonizing but as ethical pressure: poems register the effects of political violence, marginalization, and the AIDS crisis, insisting that lyric attention can be a form of witness.

Form and Technique

Technical rigor is a hallmark; Hacker often works within traditional forms while bending them toward contemporary subjects. Sonnets, tight stanzas, and controlled rhyme sit alongside freer, conversational lines, producing a tension between control and disclosure. This craft enables frequent shifts of tone, from ironic detachment to sudden vulnerability, so that the formal frame amplifies rather than contains emotion.

Voice and Tone

The voice is intelligent, urbane, and often wry, calibrated to hold both intimacy and public address. Humor and irony soften the bluntness of grief and moral outrage, allowing poems to speak plainly without losing complexity. The speaker frequently writes as a witness and a survivor, attentive to the particularities of language and the ethical demands of telling the truth about difficult lives.

Imagery and Motifs

Water, returning journeys, and domestic interiors recur as organizing images, suggesting cycles of memory and the persistence of place. Natural elements are rarely merely pastoral; they are charged with history, desire, and mourning. Time is treated as layered: present moments are haunted by earlier selves and political moments, so that each scene becomes a palimpsest of personal and collective experience.

Significance and Reception

The collection helped consolidate Hacker's reputation as a poet who could marry formal accomplishment with urgent subject matter. Its balance of private meditation and civic concern influenced later poets seeking to bring ethical seriousness to lyric practice without sacrificing musicality. Readers return to these poems for their moral clarity, their technical mastery, and the way they register the passage of time with sustained tenderness.