Delirium

Winner of the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize, The 1995 Kate Tufts Prize, and Poetry Society of America’s 1995 Norma Farber First Book Prize

“Barbara Hamby’s Delirium is involved in the work of exposing the potential for rapture in the jumble that is everywhere, the task of explaining almost cell by cell what could be if all the parts of being cooperated more fully. It takes wit to dare attempt such grand gestures, and because of that incorporation of wit, Hamby succeeds in lines so full of wit, they swell and spiral. Reading them aloud, the tongue is seduced and plays with arpeggios of syllables. Such fullness in this book! Such rhetorical acrobatics without a net! I did not know mere language could be rigged with such finesse. Hamby is a etymological and taxonomical wizard, finding everything derived from a somewhat funky root. No other book is like this one.”

—Thylias Moss, judge for the Norma Farber Prize

“In this elegant, intelligent, witty collection, 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 Fabergé’s ‘begemmed and enameled concoctions’: to recipes for meringue and 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, Booklist

Barbara Hamby’s Delirium introduces an intriguing new voice. Disarmingly confidential, refreshingly accessible and sporting a breezy sense of humor that slyly masks occasional winking depths, Hamby’s long, limber discursive couplet lines keep her stream-of-consciousness chatter meandering sinuously to a purpose, the essayist and the storyteller trading off at the controls, a guiding mind deftly pulling the strings behind the scene.

Best of all, the poems propose a witty but real kindness, countering life’s pain and business with an implicit forgiveness of the human: “the night sky/ . . . looms mysterious with its dusting of stars,/ and grants a kind of clemency/ to the whole set-to” (“Dust”).

—Tom Clark
San Francisco Chronicle 
Sunday, December 17, 1995