The Alphabet of Desire
Terese Svoboda’s entire quote:
Barbara Hamby comes laden with laurels— Vassar Miller, Kate Tufts, and Norma Farber all lavished cash and praise on her first book of poetry, Delirium. The Alphabet of Desire should attract a similar crowd-we have raised but the first flag. It is a book of smarts, the entire first section a brilliant charge on words and language:
Inspect your dialect for clues, my Marlowe, my Holmes,
your patois for signs, your pagan vernacular, your scatological
cant, your murmuring river of carnal honey,
for in the beginning there was darkness until you came,
my pluperfect anagram of erotic delight.
-"The Word"
Of wit too, there is much news in Hamby's work. I will try to resist quoting, as the sum of the parts yield the laugh, but please read "Mr. Pillow," a poem in which the narrator tries to attract her husband's attention by addressing the pillow lubriciously, the poem "Hatred" which critiques the personal with "I could just die to think how I betray myself in the great Kabuki theater of my mind, the No Theater, so to speak . . ." and especially the poem "Noli Me Tangere, Stupid" which includes:
Take the example of my teenaged
son: dining with him is like eating with Charles
Bronson in a prison movie,
twenty questions gets you twenty answers and not much else.
"Beezlebub on the Prowl," very naturally second in the title section, "The Alphabet of Desire," starts with:
Anti-Christ, antimatter—presenting the 20th century
under the big top, the flip top, the bebop
babble of astronomy, astrology, palmistry, the hand tattoo,
quantum voodoo echoing in the high trapeze.
and end in a poetry slam champion flourish:
No matter
how much you think
you know, Satan's still slicking back his hair, shining
his wingtips, smoothing his
zoot suit, sharpening his square root, because every day
is party day in Hell.
The last section is all Ode, beginning with the most archetypal romantic gesture, "Ode on My Wasted Youth" although I feel none of it was wasted when she can craft a line like:
Oh, words, my very dear friends,
whether in single perfection—mordant, mellifluous,
multilingual—or crammed together
in a gold-foil-wrapped chocolate valentine
like Middlemarch, how could I have survived without you,
the bread, the meat, the absolute confection,
like the oracles at Delphi drinking their mad honey,
opening my box of darkness with your tiny, insistent light.
I'm jealous of you, the audience. You still have the apology of Roy Roger's horse to enjoy, the tortured chess match of "Zugswang Amore" and Austen in redux. In short, you will cheer The Alphabet of Desire up and down Poetry avenue because it is a necessary book and a felicitous one.
—Terese Svoboda