Babel

<i>Babel</i> features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hambys earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable. In poems such as Six, Sex, Say, she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit in Flesh, Bone, and Red, to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in Ode on My Mothers Handwriting.Hambys poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and orangutans in the guise of men. As <i>Booklist</i> noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hambys poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive.