Delirium (Volume 2) (Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Hamby, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574410032 ISBN 13: 9781574410037

Publisher: University of North Texas Press, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and was raised in Hawai'i. She is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and critic. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, and Negative Capability. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Reviews

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of North Texas Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574410032
• ISBN 13: 9781574410037
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 103