On the Street of Divine Love

February 15, 2014
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. Hamby 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)