expression
BOOKS
DON’T THINK TWICE. HOLOHOLO! Barbara Hamby’s latest collection of poetry celebrates, let’s just say, the randomness of life by STEVE BORNHOFT
W
ith Enheduanna, a Sumerian princess and high priestess who lived in the 23rd century BC, poet and professor Barbara Hamby of Tallahassee empathizes. Enheduanna, the world’s first author known by name, wrote hymns to Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. “You can just see her addressing the goddess and trying to come to grips with the dichotomy in life, beauty on the one hand and destruction on the other — love and war,” Hamby said. In a class Hamby teaches at Florida State University on odes, she moves from Enheduanna to the Bible and finds in the Song of Solomon, too, an effort to balance the chaos and beauty of the world. “Or, as Keats would say, the truth and beauty,” Hamby said. Life is both dark and lovely. And chaotic. We try to impose rules and order on the world, but they don’t much hold. People are unfailingly unreliable. Life throws us a lot of wild cards. Those realities, I suppose, go a long way toward accounting for Hamby’s willingness to let things proceed as they will and for her fondness for a Hawaiian word, holoholo, meaning to take off without a destination in mind.
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July-August 2021
TALLAHASSEEMAGA ZINE.COM
Holoholo, her latest book of poetry, published in February by the University of Pittsburgh Press, is imbued with the kind of attitude that might characterize someone who, when traveling, never will permit herself to reverse course if she makes a wrong turn. She just keeps going. “I never had a career plan,” Hamby said. “My major was poetry, and my minor was Renaissance art history. When the Legislature was trying to alter the Bright Futures scholarship program to ensure that kids would pursue majors leading to employment, I said to my husband, ‘Our major, poetry, will be at the bottom of the list.’” But poetry worked out for Hamby and David Kirby, about whom Hamby writes, “There never was or ever will be in the history of the world someone who is more fun to holoholo with.” Both are professors in the English Department at Florida State University. Hamby delights in the fact that businesses love to hire English majors. Before she published her first book, she was for years a technical writer.
↑ POET AT REST In Barbara Hamby’s
yard in the Myers Park neighborhood live massive live oak trees, one of them older than Tallahassee. On less peaceful days, they had been observed “swaying like giant dancers,” Hamby has written.
I am dark but lovely, daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the pavilions of Salmah. Take no notice of my swarthiness, it is the sun that has burned me. My mother’s sons turned their anger on me, they made me look after the vineyards. Had I only looked after my own! — Song of Solomon 1: 5-6
photography by SAIGE ROBERTS
