HADAS, Rachel

Born 8 November 1948, New York, New York

Daughter of Moses and Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas; married Stavros Kondilis, 1970 (divorced); George Edwards, 1978; children: Jonathan

A poet, essayist, translator, critic, and professor of literature, Rachel Hadas grew up in a literate and intellectual setting. Her father was a classical scholar and professor at Columbia University, her mother a Latin teacher. Hadas' relationship with her father, with whom she spent many hours reading Latin texts and learning the Greek alphabet, was of particular importance in the formation and development of her writing. When her father died, Hadas was seventeen; this loss figured early, and lastingly, in the focus and themes of her work. The themes of loss, memory and legacy, the ways in which knowledge is passed from generation to generation, particularly in consideration of the uses of art, appear, transmute, and evolve throughout her poetry and essays.

After receiving her B.A. from Harvard University in 1969, Hadas traveled to Greece on fellowship. There she first met, among others, poet James Merril, whose presence as friend and influence can be felt in Hadas' later work, and her first husband, with whom she lived on the Greek island of Samos for some years. After returning to the U.S., she studied at Johns Hopkins, received an M.A. in poetry, and later her Ph.D. from Princeton, going on to teach literature at Rutgers University.

Hadas' first two collections of poetry have as their subject and setting her years in Greece. In the chapbook Starting from Troy (1975), the poems have a fragmentary feel, and the images and references, for all their debt to the classical, are very personal. The poem "That Time, This Place," starting with the image of Troy and the "fossils of families and fates of war," goes on to consider whether we must "build what was by tearing down / what is, beat down our celebrated towers / to our own stature, shut our eyes, and sing?" This poem's repeated refrain, "the shell remains, the softer parts decay," and final two lines, "All fighters, fathers, all departed heroes, / our house cries out for you," address Hadas' absorption with loss and legacy. Already present, as well, is her command of poetic form and structure.

In Pass it On (1989), Hadas names the impulse found in her previous work: to pass on what we inherit from others, whether fathers, mothers, friends, or long-dead writers. That inheritance includes the memories, feelings, and legacies of their work in life, the complex lens of an individual's experience and perceptions as it endures for those who continue on after their death. The poems range from what is passed on by an individual poet's work to the passing on of legacy in more physical form, through Hadas' son, to the larger passing on of language: "Not light but language shocks us out of sleep" ("The End of Summer"). Using a variety of meters and stanzaic forms, the poems in this volume, most particularly those that rely on a strict meter and rhyme, are effective, sustained meditations on large and abstract themes as they are found within the milk and carpentry of everyday life.

Living in Time (1990) came out the same year in which Hadas was given a literature award by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The book is a triptych, one long poem bracketed by two sections of prose essays. Each section examines the meaning of time and the ways in which art—in this case, writing and the poetic imagination—affects and changes our experience of it. The central poem, "The Dream Machine," a sustained reflection on the nature of reality and our need for stories with which to understand our passage through it and time, stems from a question posed by Hadas' son about whether a story she read him was "real." Among the essays in the first and third sections there is "The Lights Must Never Go Out," which relates Hadas' experiences leading a poetry writing workshop for men with AIDS. The essay illuminates how writing poetry became a way of slowing down the time the men had left to live.

In 1995 Hadas came out with The Empty Bed, a series of elegies for her recently deceased students and for her mother, poems which explore the emotional landscape of loss with some thoroughness. Hadas' motif of art and its place in our lives threads through the elegiac explorations, as in these lines from "Benefit Night, New York City Ballet": "For as we raptly gaze / at limbs in cool blue light / sculpting a carnal maze / of intricate delight, / of passions sketched on air, / it is ourselves we see, / divested of despair." Halfway Down the Hall (1998) collects selections from Hadas' previous volumes, including her translations of poems by Beaudelaire, Valéry, Hugo, and Karyotakis, along with 33 new poems in the opening section. The new poems probe Hadas' usual subjects, while exhibiting a finer, more exquisite balance than ever between adherence to formal constraints and an acute communion with the familiar and everyday. She addresses the minutia of visceral reality in an assured voice, giving the thoughts drawn from particular images a graceful strength.

With each successive volume, Hadas, who is acknowledged as one of our best technical poets, has gained depth and resonance. Her work is literate and finely honed, reaching gently profound insights through a lyric conversation with the everyday. She has received numerous awards and been a Guggenheim fellow in poetry.

Other Works:

Trelles by Stephanos Xenos (translated by Hadas, 1978). Slow Transparency (1983). Form, Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost and George Seferis (1985). A Son from Sleep (1987). Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (1991). Poetry: Mirrors of Astonishment (1992). Other Worlds Than This: Translations (1994). The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (1995).

Bibliography:

Collier, M., ed., The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry (1993).

Reference works:

American Poets Since World War II (1992). DLB 120.

Other references:

American Book Review (Aug. 1992). Bulletin of Bibliography (June 1994). Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998).Georgia Review (1984). NYTBR (6 May 1990). Poetry (Feb. 1997). Progressive (Feb. 1999).

—JESSICA REISMAN