Babel

by Barbara Hamby

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822980117
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/07/2004
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	1 MB

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.

Table of Contents

Contents I. The Mockingbird Blues My Translation The Mockingbird on the Buddha The History of Apples, Part One Idolatry O Deceitful Tongue The Mockingbird Counts to Ten The Mockingbird Falls in Love Run Vex Me The Mockingbird Invents Writing Fang Thus Spake the Mockingbird II. 13 Ways of Looking at Paris Babel Cinerama Ode to the Potato Left Bank Freudian Striptease Calling the Friends of Friends Six, Sex, Say Flesh, Bone, and Red Shh 13th Arrondissement Blues Attention, Citizen Sade Ode to American English Brain Radio Harangue The Tawdry Masks of Women III. American Odes Ode to Hardware Stores Ode to Barbecue Ode on Satan’s Power Ode on My Waist Ode on My Sharp Tongue Ode to W. E. Diemer, the Inventor of Bubblegum Ode to Rock ’n’ Roll Ode to My 1977 Toyota Ode on My Mother’s Handwriting Ode to the Bride of Frankenstein Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Hamby’s poems resemble spells, words cascading like Flora’s flowers. The result in a break-necking pace, and it is almost miraculous that this collection does not spin out of control. . . . These poems are tender, humble, and often humorous. . . . This collection does pack a punch.”
—ForeWord Magazine

“Barbar a 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

"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

“Hamby’s poems have a jumping verve and forward drive. She knows American life and language with exuberant precision and links them to the popular culture, high art, and languages of many of other countries, all of this in a prfoundly assured, resourceful, inventive and unifying voice.”

—Tar River Poetry

From the Publisher