Babel
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Book Overview
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."
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0822958597
ISBN13:9780822958598
Release Date:November 2004
Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press
Length:88 Pages
Weight:0.35 lbs.
Dimensions:0.3" x 5.9" x 9.0"
Related Subjects
PoetryCustomer Reviews
2 ratings
Another Guest for the Ideal Dinner Party
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
This is a collection of complex, intense, extremely rich riffs on urban life in America and France -- right now. And, just in case all those adjectives makes you imagine I'm ranting about some sort of unfocussed, drugged out beat wannabe ramblings -- I mean Hamby is generous with her intelligence and sophistication and elaborates both into mind bending odes with a stunning sense of classical balance and judicious length. This poetry is as sexy as Miles Davis's type of cool. If I were still giving dinner parties every other week, I'd invite her over every other month. Not all the time, mind you; but DEFINITELY often.
a flurry, whirlwind, and wonder
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
Ms. Hamby is a truly gifted poet. Her words fly from the page like a swarm of butterflies and bees, buzzing and fluttering in an intense sphere tickling your every vein. Every poem is a fusion of rant, dance, and holler, lovliness, and song. This is a true gem.
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