Bird Odyssey

by Barbara Hamby

Overview

Travel has always been Barbara Hamby's muse, and in Bird Odyssey she hits the road hard, riding a train across Siberia, taking a car trip from Memphis to New Orleans on Highway 61, and following The Odyssey from Troy to Ithaka. The concatenation of images released include Elvis and Tolstoy cruising through the sky in a pink Cadillac, Homer and Robert Johnson discussing their art in the Underworld, and the women in The Odyssey telling their side of the story, because what's a woman to do in this world of men? She has to strike out on her own, ask the right questions, and tell her own story, translating the world into her own bright lie.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965251
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 16.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Barbara Hamby has published seven books of poetry, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, and her book of linked stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 University of Iowa John Simmons Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.

Table of Contents

I Six Blackbirds on the Highway to Moscow

Ode to My Gulag 3

The Dream of the Dacha 5

Ode to Petersburg 8

Lyovt 9

Toshno 11

Over-the-Hill Tenors after the Opera 13

Ode to Lenin's Overcoat 15

Six Blackbirds on the Highway to Moscow 17

The Brides of Ekaterinburg 18

Letter to a Lost Friend 20

Ode to Sirin, the Bird Goddess of the Siberian Milky Way 21

Ode to Luck and All His Roosters and Dogs 22

II Three Vultures on the Blacktop to Memphis

Discussing the Crucifixion with Jehovah's Witnesses at the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald House in Montgomery, Alabama 27

Three Vultures on the Blacktop to Memphis 29

Fried Chicken Boiled Peanut Blues 31

Ode to Reading Proust in Memphis 33

Elvis and Tolstoy Save the World 35

Driving in the Rain 38

Past Itta Bena Near Quito Plantation 39

I Be Dead Blues 41

Jennie Hodgers Tells All 44

Wanda Jackson at Tipitina's, Saturday May 19, 2012 47

Riding Through the Ninth Ward with the Vice-President of Uganda 48

New Orleans Dithyramb 50

III To A Chickadee at Troy

Athena Ode 55

Ode to a Chickadee at Troy 56

A Farewell to Shopping 58

The Lotus Eaters: Ode on My Pothead Nephews 60

Ode to Roadside Shrines 62

Full-Moon Polyphemus Blues 64

Ode on My Vertigo, Wildflowers, and the Nature of Love 65

Olympia 67

Homer and Robert Johnson Talk about Gigs in the Underworld 69

Ode on Words for Water 73

The Odyssey in Six Sonnets

I Nausicaa 75

II Circe 76

III Mother in the Underworld 77

IV Sirens' Song 78

V Calypso 79

VI Penelope's Lament 80

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

Past praise for On the Street of Divine Love:
The divine love in this book is at heart the love of poetry itself, and to partake of these poems is to share a measure of the poet's devotion.

The Yale Review - George Bradley

Past praise for All-Night Lingo Tango:
Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix that one can’t help devouring.

Bomblog - Susie DeFord

Past praise for Babel:
One has only to read a few pages of Babel to feel in the presence of a poet with a unique, many-layered consciousness, and a few more pages to realize that her considerable verbal dexterity and mastery of tone are qualities she’s capable of sustaining. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high- wire performer’s notion of a good time.

final judge for the AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Poet Stephen Dunn

"Hamby's poetry always takes us on a journey. . . . fun for all readers." —Library Journal
 

Past praise for Babel:
 
“One has only to read a few pages of Babel to feel in the presence of a poet with a unique, many-layered consciousness, and a few more pages to realize that her considerable verbal dexterity and mastery of tone are qualities she’s capable of sustaining. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high- wire performer’s notion of a good time.” —Stephen Dunn, final judge for the AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Past praise for All-Night Lingo Tango:
 
“Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix that one can’t help devouring.” —Susie DeFord, Bomblog
 


Past praise for On the Street of Divine Love:

 “The divine love in this book is at heart the love of poetry itself, and to partake of these poems is to share a measure of the poet's devotion.” —George Bradley, The Yale Review

From the Publisher

05/15/2018
Extended riffs unwinding in one big propulsive surge, Hamby's poetry always takes us on a journey. So it's no surprise that her new work (after On the Street of Divine Love) jaunts across Siberia, motors through the South, and sails with Odysseus. The result is rich with cultural reference and contemporary insight, told in Hamby's typically sly, witty, colloquial language. Encountering "Six Blackbirds on the Highway to Moscow," she reflects, "I believe/ in the mystery of the universe, because as fast as one question/ is answered, another will unfold like crocuses." "Three Vultures on the Blacktop to Memphis" are "reminders to take it all in because I'm heading/ somewhere on this misbegotten stretch of road and going fast." The section "Chickadee at Troy" opens by addressing Athena, "O goddess of attitudes, yes, ma'am,/ …hear my prayer, because I'm adrift in a sea of words." VERDICT Fun for all readers.

Library Journal