"Of our group, our docent notes Has death undone so many / Really our docent doesn't, / judging from the past, / expect to get a laugh"
"Oh, let love linger / a little longer for the younger.
. . "
"And I would ask you, / seriously, exactly what / I thought would be / expected of me: "If one / must speak so plainly, / Why say anything at all"
"When the jokes flowed like, well, like wine /
and the wine like jokes, and anything went"
"If you'd have stopped me, / there on Sixth Avenue / and read me my future / like a waiter quoting / the specials, I'd have laughed / you off in a gentle / manly way, with spare change"
Though at times whimsical and witty, the poems in Hastings Hensel's Ballyhoo inhabit the world beyond and between the punchline.
In tightly controlled meditations on language's limits and its necessity, as well as on the many forms that humor takescomedy, laughter, farce, clowning, parody, and moreHensel navigates fine lines between joy and sadness, jokes and cruelty, reality and illusion, and irony and sincerity.
Universal in scope, thepoems in Ballyhoo are richly idiomatic and evocative, They are also frequently grounded in the southern Atlantic coast with its particular ecology, characters, history, and myth, The pleasure in reading these poems comes from the original connections Hensel makes between the literary and the gritty: an elegy set in a bait shop, Twelfth Night's Feste delivering a monologue in a bar, a villanelle about a murder on a cruise ship.
These intelligent, insightful poems remind us of the frail but important relationships between comedy, memory, and identity, Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world, .