Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby{\textquoteright}s precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity, alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that reverberate across {\textquoteleft}all the empty places{\textquoteright} of the world.
Reviews
{\textquotedblleft}His poems afford the rare pleasure of listening to a polished yet deeply humane sensibility respond, in language of exhilarating verve, to whatever it seizes on or despairs of.{\textquotedblright}--The New Criterion
}, year = {2011}, publisher = {Carcanet}, address = {Manchester}, isbn = {9781847770660}, language = {eng}, }