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Rachel Hadas' Languages of Questions
by Melissa Adamo

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oet, translator, and essayist Rachel Hadas explores language and life to "light up the human moment" for herself and her readers (Living in Time). In a review of Hadas' The Ache of Appetite (2010) for Able Muse, Julie Stoner asserts, "[Hadas] repeatedly delivers a fresh perspective tonally, formally, and metaphorically." Hadas' use of form reminds readers that formal poetry is not restrictive but rather helpful, allowing poems to breathe and speak in new ways. Although she tends to favor quatrains and heroic couplets, her use of form reads easily because she never begins writing with a form in mind. Hadas often turns to form in the editing process, letting the poem dictate its particular need for a form. Stoner also adds, "For decades now, Hadas has been painting successive views of New York City and her respites from it; of Greek landscapes and literature; of her parents' deaths; of her son's growth; of choices and the lack thereof; and of the relationship between the Muses and their mother, Memory."

In addition to these subjects, I wish to examine Hadas' discussion of questions and language. These investigations and definitions of words establish her works' timelessness. Hadas recognizes poetry is "a motherlode of unanswered, dangling questions and at the same time of spontaneous, unprovoked answers...Poetic questions can do without answers; what they must have is pace, poise, authority" (Classics). This poise is Hadas' writing. Her work invites readers to question along with her; not simply because she asks, but due to the way she asks. She keeps readers interested in her many well-crafted lines, because Hadas teaches us that people can find solace in the question itself, or even answers in the whitespace.

Life

Rachel Hadas was born on November 8, 1948, growing up on Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights, New York City with her parents and her older sister Beth. Her two half-siblings, David and Jane, were the product of her father's previous marriage. Her father, Moses Hadas, a leading classical scholar and professor at Columbia University, translated poems with Rachel at a young age, establishing their relationship through language. Rachel and Beth described their mother, Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, a Latin teacher, as the most bookish person they ever knew. An avid reader, Elizabeth shared her love of words with her two children, introducing them to the world of books and reading aloud to them often. Unfortunately, Hadas' father died from a heart attack or possible stroke when she was just seventeen. Prior to the death, Hadas always read and wrote of poetry, but after, she began to "write real poems, not student exercises" (Classics).

Hadas' love of books and translation took her to Radcliffe College of Harvard, where she studied Classics and earned her BA in 1969. She then traveled to Athens, after receiving a small traveling grant, a place her father had spent time during WWII. Her reasons for leaving were partly to "find" her father, as she was still mourning the loss, partly because she did not know what to do with herself after college, and also because she had never traveled before. She calls her time in Greece her "moratorium," borrowing an Erik Erikson phrase, meaning the time of preparation for what is next. In Greece, she met poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen, who further inspired her writing. In fact, prior to arriving in Athens, poet John Hollander wrote her a letter of introduction to James Merrill, saying she had to meet him. She also met her first husband, Stavros Kondylis. The couple lived on the island of Samos, owning and operating an olive press.

During this time, she was tried and acquitted for arson, when mysterious fires erupted in their olive press. After, she and Stavros traveled back to the States together, leaving behind the bad memory of the trial. They separated shortly after, eventually divorcing. Her first chapbook, Starting from Troy, which Merrill read and gave notes on in Athens, was published in 1975, when she came back from Greece. The next year at the MacDowell Colony, Hadas met her second husband, George Edwards, a composer. In 1977, she earned her MA in Poetry (an MFA equivalency) at Johns Hopkins, and she and George married the next year. She earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton, and her dissertation, which explored the use of pastoral imagery in Robert Frost's and George Seferis' poetry, saw its publication in 1985 under the title Form, Cycle, Infinity. One year prior, her son Jonathan was born. Sadly, George was diagnosed with dementia in 2005, and passed away in 2011.

Writing and studying have never been Hadas' only occupation. Hadas began teaching as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins and did so at Princeton University, too. Ever since, teaching has been a large part of her life. She has taught in several programs, including the English department at Columbia University in 1992-93, the Hellenic Studies program in Princeton University in 1995, and the Creative Writing Program at Princeton in 1996. She also taught in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University Medical School from 2011-12. In the upcoming fall 2013 term, she will be teaching a course at NYU on creative nonfiction. Additionally, she has led poetry workshops at the Sewanee Writer's Conference and the West Chester Poetry Conference, among others. Currently, she teaches literature and creative writing courses at Rutgers-Newark full-time to both graduate and undergraduate students, as she has since 1981.

Hadas has received numerous accolades and prizes. She was awarded Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants in 1977 and 1994, the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry in 1988, an award in Literature by the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters in 1990, an O.B. Hardison Award from Folger Shakespeare Library in 2000, and was a fellow at New York Public Library's Center for Scholars & Writers (now known as the Cullman Center) in 2000.

Her publications consist of twelve poetry collections, one of which, Halfway Down the Hall (1998), contains both new and collected poems. She has also published a book of translations, Other Worlds Than This (1994), which includes poems from Tibullus, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and others, translating Ancient and Modern Greek as well as Latin and French. She also translated Seneca's Oedipus in 1994 for the Johns Hopkins Roman Drama Series and Euripides' Helen for University of Pennsylvania Press' Greek Drama Series in 1997. Additionally, she worked on an anthology, The Greek Poets: Home to the Present (2009), for which she was one of the translators and was also a co-editor. In 2006, she was featured in Between The Lines' book Three Poets in Conversation: Dick Davis, Rachel Hadas, Timothy Steele, which incorporates a short biographical note and an extended interview with her. Most recently, she guest edited The Waiting Room Reader II in 2013, a book that the CavanKerry Press describes on their website as one that "continues [their] commitment to providing high quality literature to help reduce the stress and anxiety of patients, and their caregivers, who are waiting for medical care."

In addition to this already long list of accomplishments, she also has published five other essay collections that function as a crossover of scholarship and memoir. Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams (2001), published by University Michigan Press' series, which collects prose by poets, consists of previously published essays on Greek poets, contemporary poets, poetics and teaching, as well as dreams and other influences on her own writing. In Classics (2007), published by David Robert Books, a small print on-demand press, Hadas offers a similar study of Greek poets, poetry anthologies, and lyric poetry. This work comprises of book reviews, personal essays, interviews, and even a transcript of a roundtable discussion with anthology editors, in which Shakespeare, Keats, and other poets voice their opinions.

This type of personal scholarship seems to be "trendier" as years go on; other poets, such as Anne Carson and AE Stallings, write prose in a somewhat similar way. Yet, her version of it reads as particularly Hadas-esque, perhaps because her three other essay collections further defy categorization since they not only straddle memoir and scholarship, but also include her own poems.

The dust jacket of Living in Time (1990) labels the book as "General Interest/Poetry/Women Studies." The "Poetry" label makes sense because the book includes the long poem, "The Dream Machine," described within the book later as "extended meditation, a discursive essay, in verse." "The Dream Machine," the centerpiece of the essay collection, also includes five separate poems within the piece itself. The "Women Studies" label seems inaccurate, except of course in regards to Hadas' gender. "General Interest" is particularly amusing. Is it a general interest in Hadas? Or a general interest in literature, or life? When asked, many librarians were not even familiar with the term, although one from Rutgers-Newark reported that, typically, general interest refers to factual and accessible nonfiction. Usually, such work is often on a more specific topic, for example, James McPherson's books in American history or Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. Yet Living in Time does not incorporate such specificity. To further confuse labels, Hadas writes in the preface to Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams, "I suspect that my approach is both personal and bookish—personal when I'm writing about books and bookish when I'm writing about people, address books, web pages, or wells." Here, she seems to reverse the definitions for these terms, proving that for her the personal is bookish. Such reversals permeate her work.

The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (1995) chronicles two deaths: her mother's in 1992 from cancer and her friend, Charles Barber's, from AIDS. This work and Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry (2011) both read as memoir (and Strange Relation is labeled as such) but also feature poems and close readings of literature. Another anthology, Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (1991), contains sixteen of her poems, as well as prose about them. It also includes forty-five poems from eight men diagnosed with AIDS who took part in a poetry workshop Hadas created and led at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in NYC in the 1980s. Currently, Hadas writes for Times Literary Supplement's weekly "Freelance" column, where writers "write on life," yet again another scholarly memoir venue.

As a poet, teacher, and translator, Hadas proves that each of these identifiers facilitates learning in similar ways, whether for herself, for her students, or for language itself. With each endeavor, she attempts to find and define words so that we may find and define ourselves. Her work often exposes her thought process, whether with a parenthetical aside or with her directly telling or questioning her use of a word. For example, in one poem she writes, "'Put some music on/ to fill the silence,' maybe I should say as silence settles deeper, dark and glum" (The Empty Bed). This stream of consciousness style occurs at greater length in her prose. In Strange Relation, she discusses her poem "In Your Chair," revealing the poem was inspired by a dream that did not seem to have much weight at first. However, upon reflecting during this prose writing, she realizes her poem foreshadows what was to come with her husband's diagnosis: "This [poem] is an accurate reflection of the fact that [George] had indeed (when?) begun to spend more and more time sitting down doing nothing in particular. I am seen scurrying to and fro, bringing bits of the world to him—a world has arrived in the mail for me, a world mapped out for my future travels on which only 'I would be going.'...The poem, like the dream, has an ominous resonance for me now" (7).

This same idea about connecting dreams and poems with an omniscient narrator features earlier in Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams in which she writes, "[Dreams and poems], in my experience, somehow know and can convey unappealing truths to which the waking person, the person living her daily life in prose, seems to lack access. Or is it just courage she lacks?"(141). She takes readers' hands and guides them along her journey of thought and reflection, revealing how she arrived at her conclusions or comparisons. Like a great teacher, she facilitates a discussion by showing a process and then letting the students (or readers) do the rest of the work to learn on their own. Therefore, what her prose and poetry do best are show Hadas' creative and intellectual thought process. In her multi-genre books, in particular, she provides a poem and then describes how or when it was written or what the poem has taught her years later, something scholars and students have always sought in writers' letters, biographies, or diaries.

Works

This thought process appears in earlier works, too. The most direct questioning of language and description first strongly appears in A Son from Sleep (1985). The last poem "Yes, But" repeats this title phrase, constantly interrupting itself. Describing coming home to a newborn son, Hadas disrupts her own descriptions for the entire poem. Almost all of the stanzas, except the first and then last two, begin with "yes, but." In the middle of the poem, she writes, "Yes but this is backasswards. Birth is not/ through throat or anus, not through eyes or fingers." She then responds to herself, "Yes, but it is downward." Then she responds to her response, "Yes, but down, roots, rain, the pull of earth/ making from nothing and they pull it out." The final stanza ends with "yes, and," implying that such interruptions are not "backasswards" at all, but rather invite more room for growth, as if at the end of the poem the speaker finally is willing to accept every stanza and whitespace as truth.

Hadas' poetry constantly explores this idea of push and pull in language and in her search for the "right" words. Of course, the word "right" does not even seem accurate for this concept. It implies there are wrong words. If words were wrong, surely they would be edited out of the poem. Hadas is both losing and finding words, making connections along the way in her poems. Thus, the journey to those connections is what is most important, not the word itself. Hadas engages herself in constant conversation with herself, in a way that all writers are, as they struggle to articulate intangible situations or emotions. However, unlike most other writers, Hadas often intentionally shows us this conversation, knowing the process of finding a word truly allows us to understand its depth.

"Mourning's Dichotomy" from Indelible investigates definitions. It opens: "One task of mourning's to incorporate/ fragments. Another says/ keep faith with fragmentation./ Speech is pain and silence is defeat." In these short declarative sentences, she defines and redefines "mourning's task" in relation to "fragments." She uses "faith" but not in an ethereal sense that one might think of in a discussion of mourning. Instead, her faith revolves around language or lack thereof. Often when faced with the difficult task of mourning people are at a loss for words, or repeat the same clichéd phrases over again: Sorry for your loss, my condolences, or our thoughts and prayers are with you. Hadas does not mention any of this overused language. And because she uses language in this more abstract way, her discussion of it enacts life itself; life is fragmented and it too eventually ends in silence. Our human desire to understand death and life seems to simply come from our knowledge that it cannot be done.

Hadas further writes, "Words need to weave a filament between/ opposing camps, yet silence must fit in./ While you were alive,/ presence sometimes wore the guise of absence./ Now in the mirror world of afterwards/ absence resembles presence." Here, she questions presence and absence. What is presence if not a reminder that such a person or object could eventually become or has been absent? The two words need each other in order to create meaning; they each force the word to wear "the guises" of the other. We experience this definition every day. We feel the presence of others in a crowded subway or classroom. Yet would we understand "presence" in this sense if we did not know how absence felt? If we did not feel lonely for others or even if we did not feel chilly from the lack of a coat on a spring day?

Dichotomies and definitions are created in the phrase "mirror world of afterwards." In our reflections, we see our present, what is currently there. We might even get a glimpse at our past through scars, gray hairs, and wrinkles. But Hadas also claims that we simultaneously perceive the "afterwards" of the future somehow, as we look into ourselves to question what is to come. Moreover, "mirror," "absences," "presence" are all commonly used words, making the connections between them seem routine. After all, poetry, or good poetry rather, makes readers think: "Of course! I never thought of it that way," again, lighting up human moments, thoughts, and emotions to connect and project.

In "Home Remedy," the opening poem of The Ache of Appetite, Hadas defines poems. She begins, "A poem need not be a diary/ entry or letter, dream report, or shard/ of the observations of the day,/ nor thumbnail answer to what someone said." These words read almost as a direct address, as if she is telling poetry students this definition, teaching them the do's and don'ts. Her use of iambic pentameter and simple language makes it easy to digest. The next stanza reads in the same way: "It needn't be a massive rusted arc/ of sculpture. It can be one polished stone,/ luminous as a cat's eye in the dark,/ compact as a tiny ivory pawn." Here, she adds her own poetic images to the definitions as she compares the "polished stone" to other physical objects, providing the reader more concrete images to view a poem. We no longer merely see it as a paper. Instead the stone literally gives the definition more weight.

In the next stanza she includes definitions from other authors, referencing Kafka and Northrop Frye, again playing the role of poetry instructor. In this stanza she continues, "if life's a loaf, a poem is a slice,/ not a cooked dish, let alone a full meal." This sounds like a good definition for a reluctant poetry reader, sounding shorter than a novel, which perhaps could be described as a dish or meal. So this too could be in the classroom, as metaphors are as handy for teachers as they are for poets. But this also seems to raise the question then: why would we only want a slice? When something is really tasty, and for Hadas, poetry is certainly tasty, do we not always want another helping? Next, she describes poems as a recipe, ending with "think of a poem finally as the home/ remedy for the ache of appetite." Such an ending seems beautiful yet stark, arguing we need a remedy for our hunger. But what is that hunger for? For art? For knowledge? Hadas does not provide these answers; readers can determine their own ache. They can also read this poem, being the title poem, as one that represents the dominant tone of the collection: Hadas' ache for her ill, thus absent, husband.

"Undertow, Memory, Regret, and Silence," another poem from The Ache of Appetite, also discusses presence and absence through loss, almost echoing lines from "Mourning Dichotomy," as she is still in the complicated place of grieving for her husband whom is alive but lost to dementia. The poem opens, "I didn't see you, but I felt your presence/ and leaned against you. Then the colors changed." Here, the iambic pentameter enacts the rhythms of casual speech; the diction, again, is uncomplicated, and the syntax, simple. In contrast to such straightforwardness, so much happens and doesn't happen at the same time in this eleven-line poem. There seems to be no concrete action, no person to see or lean against. And yet, we almost feel the presence of that person in the same way the speaker does.

And then "colors" change. This shift reads as abstraction, but the next few lines show readers how a storm comes in, re-coloring the place of the poem: "A curtain flapped once in the sudden wind./ Sky darkened; something flashed." The poem then shifts again, moving back and forth from clear situations to abstract ones; the speaker becomes the cloud and then quickly the "you" does: "I was a cloud,/ backlit; and then you were the cloud , and I/ the rain that spattered at the window." Next, the window takes on these lives, too. "You/ were the window, and I leaned against you,/ breathed on your pane, and drew/ a figure in the mist of my own breath."Readers feel as if they too are leaning upon this absent presence, this transparent window, drawing images in condensation. The poem ends with the speaker physically sitting down with a tangible piece of paper, ending the poem with the concrete: "went over to the table,/ pulled out a piece of paper, and sat down." She takes the paper presumably to write, perhaps this very poem, further reiterating the theme of the beauty and power of writing, juxtaposed, of course, by the silence in the title.

In her latest collection, The Golden Road, the poem "The Onset" also discusses her husband's illness, this time in a very straightforward way, as the poem begins with, "When did your illness start?" It continues with her and her son attempting to answer such a murky question. The poem moves quickly in this section. It juxtaposes "the time you held him throned/ on your shoulders high above the world" and "when the towers fell," contrasting a personal image with the national tragedy of 9/11. The next few lines continues with strictly personal memories: "Between the time you reasoned with him in the talking chair/ and his freshman year. Between the time/ you and I used to swing him as he walked/ (one-two-three whoosh! he held a hand of each)/ and when he started sleeping with his girlfriend." Again, readers see sudden flashes of a family life, creating a happy home life, free from disease or disaster. The poem also jumps from the vivid, relatable scene of two parents swinging their young child on a walk to the child maturing, marked by his sexual activities, showing how fluid time and memory are, thus proving how difficult such a question really is. The final four lines read:

But clarity is not available
as in remembered endings: the last time
we talked or laughed; no, the last time we looked
each other in the eye and saw a future.

As in previous poems, this one stops and questions itself, finding a lack of answers, unavailable clarity. In reviewing this book, Beverly Bie Brahic writes for the Times Literary Supplement, "The collection's knowledge and balance feel hard won: a few charged words can bring the whole maybe-not-so comforting construction down." Charged words certainly drive these poems. Looking a loved one in the eye represents intimacy and honesty, as does seeing a future with a loved one. But these images become hauntingly sad, knowing that illness took away not only a future, but even present moments. And perhaps this is the not-so-comforting, unsettling, or even tragic, aspect that love came before illness. Like in so many of Hadas' poems, such poignant moments define and undefine a term, answer or unanswer a question at the very same moment.

Now, how to conclude an essay on a prolific writer such as Rachel Hadas? Certainly, her work will continue to grow, her words and questions will further accumulate. The final lines of Hadas' "Five Botched Goodbyes" from Pass It On reveal her insights on language once again, and within them, readers can find their own definitions for absence, their own ending for this essay:

Language condenses into poetry,
essentially a cry
also sometimes called apostrophe
that boils down to two syllables, goodbye—
a word there's no right way to say.

Poems

Yes, But

It is irrevocable. Not like marriage
or buying a house or being merely
happy or unhappy.

Yes, but to come home after some boring concert
or party, everybody sweating, aging
and here is this whole other little life
asleep and floating, waves of possibility

Yes, but it wakes you from the silky or salty
dream-dark you need, you too, your life, your age,
it wakes you with its life       I'M ME       I'M ME

Yes, but the icons of regeneration
life stamped deep in the loins and come again
here and caressable: a miracle

Yes, but the cold prepackaged
duck whose preslit innards
I tugged and scooped this morning
packed in so tight       socked in
the flesh, the cavity, the sealed-in blood

Yes, but this is backassward. Birth is not
through throat or anus, not through eyes or finger

Yes, but it is downward

Yes, but down, roots, rain, the pull of earth
making from nothing and they pull it out

Yes, but then the toys strewn over the floor
the magnets stuck to the refrigerator
door that recapitulate our A
BC for Civilization all to be learned again,
Lamarck was wrong, I was born bare of Greek
nasty and brutish       small and ignorant

Yes, but primary colors dragged with a loaded
paintbrush over paper rich and dripping
rich smell of fingerpaints loamlike       edible

Yes, culture, nurture, but the world
is lurching towards its close.
Not simply life, this life: mortality
is true, is sometimes easy:
this world, our precious earth, the only one we live in

Yes, but all ages gutter, limp, and falter
children bring hope, they push the darkness back

Not this time, not this twilight.
No Yes, no But, just No: it is the end.
We walk its daily weight so dark upon us
unspeakable       we never speak of it
each little future flickers
doomed precious       it goes on but not forever
not long now       oh not long.

and lights across the river,
a barge passes under the bridge
bearing its black message:
the poetry reading falters
in the darkened amphitheater
sirens scream END       THE END
we scream too, friends together
we put our heads in one another's laps
wailing and waiting

Yes, and we look like mothers turned to children
children to mothers       one another's needs
even in the hour desperate, human
I do not know the end
the clock hands moving       moving
the child's cry in the night
hushes it for a little

that mortal ticking

"Yes, But," A Son from Sleep, Rachel Hadas, published by Wesleyan University Press, used by permission.

Mourning's Dichotomy

One task of mourning's to incorporate
fragments. Another says

keep faith with fragmentation.
Speech is pain and silence is defeat.

Words need to weave a filament between
opposing camps, yet silence must fit in.

While you were alive,
presence sometimes wore the guise of absence.

Now in the mirror world of afterwards.
absence resembles presence.

"Mourning's Dichotomy," Indelible, Rachel Hadas, published by Wesleyan University Press, used by permission.

Home Remedy

A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of a day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.

It needn't be a massive rusted arc
of sculpture. It can be one polished stone,
luminous as a cat's eye in the dark,
compact as a tiny ivory pawn.

Axe to the frozen sea, said Kafka. Or
(a formulation of Northrop Frye's:
myth cross-sectional yields up metaphor)
if life's a loaf, a poem is a slice,

not a cooked dish, let alone a full meal.
Not even on ripe, glowing piece of fruit;
more like a scribbled recipe to tell
future strangers the approximate

ingredients that, hungry in your time,
you put together. Cook, eat, read, and write:
think of a poem finally as the home
remedy for the ache of appetite.

"Home Remedy" from The Ache of Appetite, 2010 by Rachel Hadas. Used by permission of Copper Beech Press.

Undertow, Memory, Regret, and Silence

I didn't see you, but I felt your presence
and leaned against you. Then the colors changed.
A curtain flapped once in the sudden wind.
Sky darkened; something flashed. I was a cloud,
backlit; and then you were the cloud, and I
the rain that spattered at the window. You
were the window, and I leaned against you,
breathed on your pane, and drew
a figure in the mist of my own breath;
went over to the table,
pulled out a piece of paper, and sat down.

"Undertow, Memory, Regret, and Silence" from The Ache of Appetite, 2010 by Rachel Hadas. Used by permission of Copper Beech Press.

The Onset

When did your illness start? I and our son
reckon it must have happened in between
the time you held him throned
on your shoulders high above the world
and when the towers fell. Between the time
you reasoned with him in the talking chair
and his freshman year. Between the time
you and I used to swing him as he walked
(one-two-three whoosh! he held a hand of each
) and when he started sleeping with his girlfriend.

Such lavish spans, dwarfing mere puberty,
leave years to play with. I could narrow them,
approximate with more precision when
the shadow started ever so slowly creeping over you.
But clarity is not available
as in remembered endings: the last time
we talked or laughed; no, the last time we looked
each other in the eye and saw a future.

"The Onset" copyright 2012 by Rachel Hadas. Published 2012 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Works Cited

Brahic, Beverly Bie. "Book Review—Rachel Hadas: The Golden Road." Times Literary Supplement. (March 2013). Print.

CavanKerry Press. The Arnold E. Gold Foundation. Web. 14 May 2013.

Hadas, Rachel. The Ache of Appetite. Rhode Island: Copper Beech Press, 2010. Print.

-----Classics. Cincinnati: Textos Books, 2007. Print.

-----The Empty Bed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1995. Print.

-----The Golden Road. Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2012. Print.

-----Indelible. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

-----Living in Time. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Print.

-----Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print.

-----Pass It On. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Print.

-----Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2011. Print.

-----A Son from Sleep. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Print.

Stoner, Julie. "Book Review—Rachel Hadas: The Ache of Appetite." Able Muse. V9. (Summer 2010): n. pag. Web. 14 May 2013.


































POET DATA
Rachel Hadas
Years: 1948-
Birthplace: USA
Language(s): English, French, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek
Forms: Sonnet, Villanelle, Heroic Couplets, Free Verse, Nonce forms
Subjects: Death, Literature, Greece, New York, Teaching, Parenthood
Entry By: Melissa Adamo
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