All Night Lingo Tango ***

*** All Night Lingo Tango, Barbara Hamby, 2009

I've never been much on poetry. It must be that I lack the sophistication required to appreciate it. Whatever the cause, I don't seek it out. But for the past year or so I've been listening to the Writer's Almanac online, going back into the archives. That's where I ran across Barbara Hamby and a two poems in particular, Hear My Prayer, O Lord . . . and I Beseech Thee, O Yellow Pages, which are selections from Nine Sonnets from the Psalms. I liked them so well, I hunted down the book they came from, All Night Lingo Tango, and got it for the Kindle.

I enjoyed most of it, but my poetry-challenged brain didn't embrace everything. It wasn't until I was finished and read the notes that I discovered that some of the poems are abecedarians, a special form of acrostic, in which the initial letters of words beginning each line spell out the alphabet in order. Hamby went one further and followed two alphabets, one going forward at the beginning of each line and another going backward at the end. She calls these double helix abecedarians.

That's a lot of work. I think I'll stick to novels.