Annal:1996 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1996 Kate Tufts winner
- Score: 10.46
Barbara Hamby makes her poems out of jokes, Italian phrases, quotes from saints and philosophers, references to meals eaten and wines drunk.
In a fluid, compelling voice, she sets a stage, peoples it with real and imagined characters, spins them into dizzying motion, and then makes everything disappear as with a wave of a conjurer’s wand, leaving the reader to wonder, “Did that happen, or did I dream it?”
One leaves her poetry the way one leaves a dark theater on a July afternoon, convinced that the ordinary passions really won’t do—they need to be larger, as large as they are in these poems.
