cover image Delirium

Delirium

Barbara Hamby. University of North Texas Press, $14.95 (108pp) ISBN 978-1-57441-003-7

The second poem of Hamby's first full-length collection, ``Betrothal in B Minor,'' is a demonic celebration of the feminine. In it, women lined up like a Greek chorus bewail the ``romantic glaucoma'' triggered by our wishes and hormones, ``the tiny electrical sparks that bewilder,/ befog, beguile, becloud our angelic intellect.'' In this section, much of which is organized around bees, long, circuitous lines resemble the predator stalking its prey. One would have thought, after Sylvia Plath's bee sequence in Ariel, that women poets would stay clear of the topic, but here Hamby continually--and powerfully--intertwines their sexuality with her own. Hamby's fierce originality diffuses in the next section as she leaves the bees behind and chronicles a trip to Italy, meditating on saints and near-saints, exploring body parts, dust and doubt. Many of these poems shout their contrivances. The book ends with a multi-voiced sequence, ``The Autopsy of John Keats,'' describing that poet's voyage from London to Italy, and his final days: although high in technique, these poems move the reader less than the intense, dense poems of the first section.