Squares and Courtyards: Poems

Marilyn Hacker is one of America's best-known and beloved poets. Her well-wrought, formalist meditations on everyday life, history, illness, and womanhood -- among other topics -- have won her nearly every major poetry prize and a devoted readership the world over. Her new collection, Squares and Courtyards, opens with these lines:        Is it the boy in me who's looking out       the window, while someone across the street       mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the...