Fire Baton: Poems

By Elizabeth Hadaway

Elizabeth Hadaway doesn t just tell stories in her poems, she aims to delight as much as instruct, and her poems are scores for performance. Sparkling with shout-outs to Beowulf and Keats, varied... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557288240
• ISBN13: 9781557288240
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Terrific Book

"Fire Baton" seems to me a marvelous volume of poetry. It's got lyric intensity, verbal beauty and a very fresh sensibility. The poems are funny and original. The author's presence is both potent and appealing: she's herself and nobody else. Her voice is entirely her own. I've read it and re-read it with great pleasure. Mark Edmundson

A truly original voice.

Elizabeth Hadaway's debut is a stunning one, aptly named, as all of these poems seem to be made of fire. She is audacious, but her ability to turn any sort of rancor into a contained rhythm always sees her through. One clear thread running through Fire Baton is the necessity of telling these stories--the plain and real need to set the record straight. In "Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona," Hadaway risks tackling a major icon, and succeeds. Although she finds inspiration in artists as varied as Berryman, Shelley, and INXS, Hadaway's strange and remarkable ability to craft these poems is all hers. Lines like "The crunch of bones is what religion thrives on," or "The world is made of math, at which I suck" never fail to delight, and there are plenty of them. Nothing escapes Hadaway's razor-keen vision. We are lucky for it.