Babel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780822958598)

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."

Author: Barbara Hamby
ISBN-10: 0822958597
ISBN-13: 9780822958598
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Language: English
Published: 11/07/2004
Pages: 88
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 8.96h x 5.94w x 0.28d

Review Citation(s):
Foreword 01/01/2005 pg. 53
Booklist 11/15/2004 pg. 547
Library Journal 12/01/2004 pg. 122
Library Journal 12/15/2004
Foreword 08/19/2009