Fire Baton
Poems

Elizabeth Hadaway (Author)

9781557288240

Paperback / softback, published 30 September 2006

80 pages
21.5 x 14 x 0.8 cm, 0.14 kg

Fire Baton is an immense achievement. Here is wit acid and sweet, angry and gentle, tonic and forgiving. Every line shines with the excellence of poetic craft. . . . Hadaway's satire is deceptive in its strength. If you think you feel a pinprick, better look again. It may be a bullet hole." —Fred Chappell, author of Backsass: Poems

"Elizabeth Hadaway's Fire Baton is formally elegant, yet effortlessly sassy and vernacular at the same time. In poem after poem, she proves herself place-proud without a trace of the provincial, and she's exactly what a poet should be—smart and passionate." —Gregory Orr, author of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

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 meters, and surprising rhymes, she lifts centuries of hurt and anger into a contrary music. Her reach is vast, including everything from T. S. Eliot to the swans on her vinyl lace shower curtains. She warns us off from stereotypes and misconceptions about Appalachia and the South. Here are short lyrics and long narratives, poems about ballads, baton twirling, hound dogs, Shelley, and NASCAR stars.