Poet Barbara Hamby is unsurpassed in wit and technique in her fourth book.
Barbara Hamby triple-somersaults, dives, flips, and swings from rung to rung high over our heads on the flying trapeze. She makes it look easy, effortless. For those of us who slave in the alphabet and word circus, we know her success is hard-won and took years of toil. Don't miss her fourth full-length collection, entitled "All-Night Lingo Tango" after one of her poems. It's a perfect gift to yourself and to wordsmiths, word lovers, all writers, pop culture and high culture vultures, humorists, film buffs, and women and men of a certain age. You can't go wrong.
Not only is Hamby amazing to watch, but she has created her own contraptions to showcase her wit: elaborate forms using the alphabet which she has named "the double-helix abecedarians" and "abecedarian sonnets." The sign of a top poet is one who surprises even herself, and Hamby has done that through forcing herself to stretch her imagination through these forms.
In addition to her alphabetic forms where lines must begin and end on certain letters of the alphabet, Hamby mixes high and low culture, humor, music, and old movies to create some of the best poetry being written in the twenty-first century US of A. Despite her foreign travels, her wildness and restlessness are quintessentially American, and refreshing.
Hamby has paid her dues and published in numerous top journals. Born in New Orleans, raised in Hawaii (she has several great poems about Hawaii), and now living and teaching in Florida, she has produced four full-length poetry collections and two chapbooks. Her knowledge of film (her website lists her favorite movies), as well as Shakespeare, TV, and American pop culture, is broad, and she uses all of her experience and travels in her energetic, hilarious, yearning, and finely crafted poems. Several times I laughed outloud or gasped, "How does she do that." Alas, I rarely feel that way when reading much contemporary poetry.
All writers in all genres should read her work for inspiration, not to write like her, but to consider inventing their own aesthetic process that is as unique as hers. In her poems her voice is that of the gutsy, smart, wise-cracking party girl (or boy), the one you want to be next to at the bar so you don't miss anything. She is where it's happening, in terms of her vast knowledge of contemporary culture but also in her insights into society, humankind, and middle age.
For once the blurbs are accurate. Renowned poet Albert Goldbarth states her poetry is "unconstrained but strangely formal, wise and wicked..." Legendary poet and editor Richard Howard writes, "As the poet has discovered for herself, NOTHING succeeds like excess. Her poems have taught me how to be happy while hysterical, or even just how to be hysterical without tears. Who else could get me there so fast, so far, so fastidiously?" And editor Susan Hahn describes "All-Night Lingo Tango" as "a whirling genius of a book." Hamby has earned the kudos. Her publication credits and awards are many. But unlike some, there is no pomposity here despite the lavishness. Rather, there is self-deprecation, a wicked sense of humor, and her bubbly, at times hysterical, wit. Bravo!
The book is in three parts. The first and last are odes, while the middle section is 26 sonnets for the letters of the alphabet. No formal education in poetry is required to enjoy these wonderful poems, though I realized there are a number of old films I need to see or see again. There are many surprises here, from the outrageous titles ("Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory") to amazing insights: "And if you're lucky, my friend,/ there's a ten-year-old boy inside you--Huck, Tom, Buckwheat,/ Alfalfa, Jack Mouse, Q-tip, even Beaver Cleaver,/ because face it the teacher is always yelling, 'No!' " (from "Ode to Little Boys"). In poems such as "Betty Boop's Bebop," "Olive Oyl Thinks About Quantum Theory," and "Zeus, It's Your Leda, Sweetie Pie," we think about subjects great and small. We are expanded and we are entertained. Amazing.
Hamby has endured and now she's "sui generis." In a category of her own. Do not seek to imitate her, but note how far her creative process has brought her. In one interview, she remarked that she's now trying free verse without these formal constraints, and her work is different and has advanced as a result. Like the modern dancer who knows all the balletic moves, she is free to push the envelope in some new way.
For more information about Barbara Hamby's work, you can visit her author website: www.barbarahamby.com or visit the English Department at Florida State University: www.english.fsu.edu/faculty/bhamby.htm for a complete list of her books and honors.
"All-Night Lingo Tango" may be purchased at any fine bookstore or on-line. It is part of the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press (www.upress.pitt.edu).
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