Bøger af Barbara Hamby

Poems navigate the American chaos of wars, street violence, apocalyptic fantasies, and racial tension.

Travel has always been Barbara Hamby's muse, and in Bird Odyssey she hits the road hard, riding a train across Siberia, taking a car trip from Memphis to New Orleans on Highway 61, and following The Odyssey from Troy to Ithaka.

On the Street of Divine Love is a collection of twenty-five years of Barbara Hamby's poems-word drunk excursions into the American female consciousness with stops in Italy, Paris, and London.

""Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids."" Thus begins Barbara Hamby's magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu.

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 1994. Barbara Hamby makes her poems out of jokes, Italian phrases, quotes from saints and philosophers, references to meals eaten and wines drunk. In a fluid, compelling voice, she sets a stage, peoples it with real and imagined characters, spins them into dizzying motion, and then makes everything disappear as with a wave of a conjurer's wand, leaving the reader to wonder, "Did that happen, or did I dream it?" One leaves her poetry the way one leaves a dark theater on a July afternoon, convinced that the ordinary passions really won't do--they need to be larger, as large as they are in these poems.

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.