Babel
Winner of the AWP 2003 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
One has only to read a few pages of Barbara Hamby's Babel to feel in the presence of a poet with a unique, many-layered consciousness, and a few more pages to realize that her considerable verbal dexterity and mastery of tone are qualities she's capable of sustaining. 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, final judge for the Donald Hall Prize
Barbara 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
Here is an imagination so free-ranging, philosophically inquisitive, humorous, and sharp, that in a rhapsody on pink it seamlessly connects the invention of bubblegum to Bosch, moveable type to the drive to create—and so much earthly delight along the way. She is as emotionally resonant as she is dazzling.
—Aliki Barnstone
Read the Reviews:
- American Poetry
- Booklist —Starred Review
- Missouri Review
- Tar River Poetry
- Carolina Quarterly
- Coffee House Review
- Fore Word