Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Burn
by Barbara Hamby
University of Pittsburgh Press
Oct 2025, $20.00, 88 pp, ISBN: 978-0-8229-6752-1
In “Want Ode” Barbara Hamby writes, “I am roaming the outer edges of my own mind,” as she details her ephemeral wants: “I want to swim across the Bosphorus with Byron, / to be his club foot and the ink in his pen as he writes / Don Juan….I want to be a cat with a tail that curls / around my feet…I want to step into Beethoven’s filthy apartment with the pizza / boxes stacked on the floor and listen to him pound / his piano into splinters. I want to be the splinters and the pain / in his gut that becomes the opening of his Fifth.”
Roaming around the outer edges of her mind, indeed. This is an apt description of all of Hamby’s omnivorous odes as she considers first one thing – luck, parties, Caravaggio, rage – and then another – boxes, kitchens, radio music, and, everywhere, the Greek gods. “I want to dream and never wake” is another apt characterization. The odes in Burn are drenched in dream.
As she writes in her essay that concludes Burn, the ode may be defined as a poem of praise on an exalted topic, but also, “there was a subversive negotiation going on” between the poets and their subjects, citing Whitman and Ginsberg, Horace and the English Romantics, Neruda and Komunyakaa and Bernadette Mayer’s “Ode to My Period.” Hamby’s odes are full of joie de vivre irreverence, finger-in-your-eye insouciance, and linguistic dexterity. She writes in “Ode on Consciousness, Cell phones, Joshua Bell and the Night of the World”: “there’s a ping-pong game in my mind / between Ecstasy and Fury.” The title of the poem certainly suggests as much!
“Ode to All My Late-Night Great Ideas” begins:
The Germans have a word for you—Schnappsidee—an idea
fueled by Margaritas or shots of tequila or bottles of red
wine or white, you know the ideas that maybe involve a road trip
to Miami or California and you wake up in a parking lot
in Mississippi or Delray Beach with a dead French fry stuck
to the side of your face or you decide to drive over
to your ex’s house at 3 am and give him what your mother
used to call “a piece of your mind.
Hamby’s ideas flow like a person talking to herself, and we get to listen in. Her free-association stream-of-consciousness is exactly the stuff of dreams, as alluded to earlier, so it’s no surprise that so many of the odes involve dreams. “Ode on the Rilke Metro Stop in the Paris of My Dreams” is one (“In this dream we’re in Paris, driving around in a car, / which is a nightmare…”). “Ode to the Lost House” is another (“…now I dream of you, / my former house…but in another dream / I drive by you…”). “Ode to My Unquiet Mind in the Bowling Alley of My Soul” is an ode imbued with dreaming. It also involves the Greek gods and goddesses of myth, who appear all over these odes.
“Ode to Juno, Queen of Heaven,” “Ode in Which Apollo Bitches about Caravaggio’s Medusa,” “Ode in which Athena Tells Off Aphrodite at the Steak and Shake on Jackson Bluff Road” (“What is it with you, ‘Phro? You ask me out to talk / about Apollo, and the first guy you see, / poof—I’m nothing.”) feature the deities, but so do “Ode on Empty Lots and the Devils in the Bushes” (“I’m partial to Athena and Aphrodite / or the Sumerian Inanna, who was the goddess of love / and war…”) and “Ode on Being a Little Drunk at Parties” (“Athena, / what’s your problem, girl? You’ve got it all— / howitzer tits and a brain the size of Olympus—and all you do / is cause trouble among the chuckleheads on earth.”). Moreover, ancient poets who generally seem like footnoted names in history books – Caravaggio, Ovid – come alive as real human beings with distinct personalities in her storytelling, dream-making verse.
If “Ode to the Last Kiss in Venice,” a dream poem about her father that ends in an allusion to death, the following poem, “Ode to Words for the Body,” an amusing poem about euphemisms, in praise of the (female) body, ends with an allusion to birth.
Hamby also writes endearingly about her family, especially her mother. “Ode to the Last Kiss in Venice” is about her father, but her mother shows up all over the place, including in “Ode on My Mother’s Scissors,” “Ode on Paradis and the Longing for a Place that Never Was” (which also involves her sister), “Ode on the Rilke Metro Stop in the Paris of My Dreams “ and the lengthy final poem, “Ode to English, Amok and Running” (“my mother comes back from the river / of souls, and says, There’s only one book, darling, the Bible, / and it will tell you everything you need to know, and though / I don’t completely agree with her, the Bible has a lot of great stories…”). Both parents appear in “Ode to My Half Sister,” a charming poem involving a confusing reading of a DNA report. There’s also the touching “Ode to My Brother Who I Haven’t Spoken to in Thirteen Years.”
My brother with the broken violin of his heart,
with the five-alarm fire in his brain, who painted
a portrait of our mother wearing our father’s glasses
that she filled with her prescription after he died.
Barbara Hamby knows her odes – it’s all ode gold. Yes, her odes are indeed full of praise, but yes, they are subversive – very subversive.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash calledSee What I Mean?was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars,The Trapeze of Your Flesh,was published by BlazeVOX Books.