"Babel" features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's 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...

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...