Description
Babel features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable.
In poems such as "Six, Sex, Say," she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife "with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit" in "Flesh, Bone, and Red," to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in "Ode on My Mother's Handwriting."
Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and "orangutans in the guise of men." As Booklist noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hamby's poems "are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive."
About the Author
Barbara Hamby has published seven books of poetry, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, and her book of linked stories, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the 2010 University of Iowa John Simmons Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
Reviews
Babel is a word-lover's romp, a cultural historian's playground. Hamby can be as inclusive as Goldbarth, as intelligently zany as Frank O'Hara. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high-wire performer's notion of a good time.-Stephen Dunn; ""Barbara Hamby's Babel is just that-a wild confluence of words almost inundated by its barely restrained verbal enthusiasms. Funky, erudite, obsessively referential, and wild with listing, her poems orgiastically invite us to hurl ourselves into them.""-Billy Collins
Book Information
ISBN 9780822958598
Author Barbara Hamby
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press
In poems such as "Six, Sex, Say," she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife "with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit" in "Flesh, Bone, and Red," to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in "Ode on My Mother's Handwriting."
Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and "orangutans in the guise of men." As Booklist noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hamby's poems "are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive."
About the Author
Barbara Hamby has published seven books of poetry, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, and her book of linked stories, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the 2010 University of Iowa John Simmons Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
Reviews
Babel is a word-lover's romp, a cultural historian's playground. Hamby can be as inclusive as Goldbarth, as intelligently zany as Frank O'Hara. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high-wire performer's notion of a good time.-Stephen Dunn; ""Barbara Hamby's Babel is just that-a wild confluence of words almost inundated by its barely restrained verbal enthusiasms. Funky, erudite, obsessively referential, and wild with listing, her poems orgiastically invite us to hurl ourselves into them.""-Billy Collins
Book Information
ISBN 9780822958598
Author Barbara Hamby
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press
