Babel (Pitt Poetry Series) by Barbara Hamby  (2)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The second poem of Hamby's first full-length collection, "Betrothal in B Minor," is a demonic celebration of the feminine. In it, women lined up like a Greek chorus bewail the "romantic glaucoma" triggered by our wishes and hormones, "the tiny electrical sparks that bewilder,/ befog, beguile, becloud our angelic intellect." In this section, much of which is organized around bees, long, circuitous lines resemble the predator stalking its prey. One would have thought, after Sylvia Plath's bee sequence in Ariel, that women poets would stay clear of the topic, but here Hamby continually-and powerfully-intertwines their sexuality with her own. Hamby's fierce originality diffuses in the next section as she leaves the bees behind and chronicles a trip to Italy, meditating on saints and near-saints, exploring body parts, dust and doubt. Many of these poems shout their contrivances. The book ends with a multi-voiced sequence, "The Autopsy of John Keats," describing that poet's voyage from London to Italy, and his final days: although high in technique, these poems move the reader less than the intense, dense poems of the first section.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In this elegant, intelligent, witty collection--winner of this year's Vassar Miller prize in poetry--Hamby frequently favors a six-beat, alexandrine-like line in couplets that in her hands become turbocharged, multilingual compendia. Her subject is often the miraculous discovered in the ordinary: "There is always a miracle if you know / where to look," she reminds us. There is nothing remotely ordinary, however, about the language in which she reveals that miracle. A wildly fluent poem about eggs, for instance, brings us from breakfast through Piero della Francesca's painting of Christ and Faberge's "begemmed and enameled concoctions" to recipes for meringue and then lands squarely, finally, at the miracle of life itself. Once started, it's hard to stop reading Hamby, so tightly does she knit each line of her rich, full, strong poetry to the next. Patricia Monaghan
The second poem of Hamby's first full-length collection, "Betrothal in B Minor," is a demonic celebration of the feminine. In it, women lined up like a Greek chorus bewail the "romantic glaucoma" triggered by our wishes and hormones, "the tiny electrical sparks that bewilder,/ befog, beguile, becloud our angelic intellect." In this section, much of which is organized around bees, long, circuitous lines resemble the predator stalking its prey. One would have thought, after Sylvia Plath's bee sequence in Ariel, that women poets would stay clear of the topic, but here Hamby continually-and powerfully-intertwines their sexuality with her own. Hamby's fierce originality diffuses in the next section as she leaves the bees behind and chronicles a trip to Italy, meditating on saints and near-saints, exploring body parts, dust and doubt. Many of these poems shout their contrivances. The book ends with a multi-voiced sequence, "The Autopsy of John Keats," describing that poet's voyage from London to Italy, and his final days: although high in technique, these poems move the reader less than the intense, dense poems of the first section.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In this elegant, intelligent, witty collection--winner of this year's Vassar Miller prize in poetry--Hamby frequently favors a six-beat, alexandrine-like line in couplets that in her hands become turbocharged, multilingual compendia. Her subject is often the miraculous discovered in the ordinary: "There is always a miracle if you know / where to look," she reminds us. There is nothing remotely ordinary, however, about the language in which she reveals that miracle. A wildly fluent poem about eggs, for instance, brings us from breakfast through Piero della Francesca's painting of Christ and Faberge's "begemmed and enameled concoctions" to recipes for meringue and then lands squarely, finally, at the miracle of life itself. Once started, it's hard to stop reading Hamby, so tightly does she knit each line of her rich, full, strong poetry to the next. Patricia Monaghan
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