Burn: Poems

The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts that everything is a mess—how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, “How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn’t. But I will.”

About the Author :
Barbara Hamby is the author of Holoholo, Bird Odyssey, and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Burn is her eighth book of poems. In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai’i, Lester Higata’s 20th Century,won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares,and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University, where she is distinguished university scholar, and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Review :
The joy that meets the arrival of a new book by Barbara Hamby is comparable to standing before the many-chambered facade of an Advent calendar: Each page opens onto a new wonder. Barbara Hamby’s big, bawdy odes burn with the hard-won wisdom and delirious energy of a 'grown woman' who has lived to tell the tale. Hamby references Whitman for good reason. The wide lines of a panicked chatterbox insist on taking up space; the drive of embodied vigor from the heart, “with all its swelling / crescendos and arias of accordion classics,” and the brain, full of “Hamlet and refrigerator / warranties,” threatens to rupture the very edges of the page. I love the Penelope-like weaving and unweaving of so-called high and low culture. From Horace and Rimbaud to Athena, with her “howitzer tits and a brain the size of Olympus,” Apollo and Caravaggio occupying the same poem as “Easter bunnies in hula skirts,” and Persephone showing up in the bowling alley of the speaker’s soul. There is grief here, of course. Family grief, and grief for the land, all enwrapped in the orange cape of political grief, but never low-octane grief, even as we search the TV for “a new / show, starring our beautiful hideous selves,” even as we must admit the party’s over. Still, in Barbara Hamby’s hands, language and the ode are “amok and running.” In Burn, Barbara Hamby returns to her signature power odes full of humor and wonder. She’s a poet equally at ease with old-timey gods and goddesses, cherry Kool-Aid, and Cracker Jack. Her wit and wisdom are the prizes we dig for in each of her poems as she helps us navigate the terrifying world of environmental devastation and dangerous political nonsense. Who else but Barbara Hamby could respond to propaganda and misinformation with a hefty abecedarian ode to the beauty and truth of the English language? She is fearless and she is peerless. She is poets' own Lady Luck to the rescue “looking like Glinda/in The Wizard of Oz.” Hamby’s odes are full of joie de vivre irreverence, finger-in-your-eye insouciance, and linguistic dexterity.