On The Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems
“Hamby’s poems are good-natured, gossipy, and fun . . . She attempts to render in verse the near chaos of perception that typifies human consciousness as it careers through a lifetime’s worth of unruly accident . . . With its delight in sensuality and in the sensuality of speech above all, with its yoking together of serious and casual concerns, with its steady stream of confidences occasioned by irruptions of memory, there is a lot to like in Hamby’s verse . . . You might come away from ‘On the Street of Divine Love’ thinking its author is not only an excellent poet but would also make an ideal conversationalist over dinner. We can’t all wangle the invitation, but we can all read her quick-witted, exuberant, and molto simpatico book.”
“Even those who profess to dislike or fear poetry will find themselves bedazzled and uplifted by Hamby’s long-lined, subtly rhymed, sure-footed, take-me-to-the-bridge lyrics. Funny, nimble, knowing, deeply well read and nurtured by art, film, and music, and ebulliently imaginative, she is an adept storyteller-in-verse and juggler of juxtapositions, such as, in “The Word,” the biblical Noah and Aretha Franklin, the Buddha and Thomas Edison, sex and the atom bomb. There is so much motion in her poems. She commands the page like a swing dancer takes the floor, a surfer rides the big waves, a skater swoops round the ring. Along with generous selections from her four previous collections, On the Street of Divine Love delivers resplendent, jazzy, capacious, rapturing new poems, in which Hamby writes of insomnia and prayer, hearing Lil’ Kim on a radio in Florence, and walking in Rome on that divinely named street thinking, “I want a God / big enough to love those who don’t believe in him, / because isn’t it enough just to walk this world / with its psychedelic wah wah, its lightning storms and squalor?” Amen.
– Donna Seaman, Booklist, February 15, 2014
“Get ready for a wild ride when you dive into Barbara Hamby’s ‘On the Street of Divine Love.’ You’ll soon be roaring down avenues of the alphabet with a poet who is dazzled by–and a master of–our lingo. . . .The effervescent and all-encompassing nature of Hamby’s poems give the reader a sense of discovery and vitality. “
“Reading Barbara Hamby’s poetry is like going on a road trip, one where the woman behind the wheel lets you ride shotgun as she speeds across the open highways of an America where drive-in movie theaters still show Janet Leigh films on Friday nights, hardware stores have not been driven out of business by soulless corporate titans, and where long poetic lines first introduced by Walt Whitman and resurrected by Ginsberg are pregnant with a thousand reasons to marvel at the world we inhabit.”
– Paul Kareem Tayyar, On the Road Again: Barbara Hamby’s American Odyssey