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  • JOYRIDING TO NIGHTFALL
SELECTED POEMS



By Joan Colby 


 An
observer of all types of human behavior, a social critic and a passionate
appraiser of our ability to soar or to drown in a downward spiral, Joan Colby's
poems are both loud and haunting, both vivid and quiet as a falling stone. Like
the resonance of an ancient gong or the silence of everyone's mysterious inner
journey, Colby reflects to us who we are: agile mentalists or farmers toiling
the earth under a hot sun; younger or finally wrinkled with wisdom; men, women,
spirits, and horses all racing towards divergent destinations while Fate looks
down at us and smiles wryly.



-------------------------------------------------------------------Christina
  Zawadiwsky





"More
than almost any poet I know, Joan Colby follows John Keats's advice to "load
every cranny with ore." Whether she's mining salt or emeralds, the reader will
be the richer for it!"


Dan
Veach
www.danveach.com
Editor,
Atlanta Review
danveach@hotmail.com




Joan
  Colby is one of night’s dark agents cataloging misery, atrocity, and death.
  Collected here is a large body of evidence that Wisconsin Death Trip is
  closer to reality than Midwesterners let on. Colby is an indie vet and these
  selected poems evolve chronologically from imagistic bursts to longer
  narratives. But don’t be deceived by the random beauty amid the mortality. No
  sugar coating here. These poems are “brimming with emeralds and bones.” Colby
  is heir to Penelope, muse of shiver, crafting darkness and light into a
haunting tapestry of wisdom and truth. –Richard Peabody, editor Gargoyle
Magazine




Joan Colby’s Selected Poems brings to mind Walter Pater’s
  imperative to “burn always” with a “hard, gemlike flame.” Emotional
  intensity and large sympathies characterize this collection, which is
  underwritten by an intelligence itself as fiery as it is sharp. When Colby
  writes of “Byzantine / Geometrics suggesting a rage of contained / Passion,” she
  in effect offers an insight into her work, for its passion is
  contained--and simultaneously heightened--by her keen sense of artistry; she writes
  that “Existence is terrible,” but these poems, despite that existence--or
  arguably because of it--incorporate a luxuriance, a kind of flirtation with
  wildness, that enriches them while never engulfing her craft. In a poem for
  Sylvia Plath, whose own passionate intelligence could be a template for Colby’s,
  she speaks of “loss and a furious resolve,” and such a balanced opposition
  defines the Colby dynamic. As a poet of landscape and the people and
  creatures who inhabit it--the D. H. Lawrence of Birds, Beasts and Flowers would
  particularly admire here besides love poems of a Solomonic fervor the strong
  feeling she brings to close observation--Colby advises, “Pay attention now.
  Look for one / Green thing to remember,” and she takes her own advice,
  remembering through her verse “everything holy or bleak.” Readers who
  respond to her invitation to “Come in. / Sit / here in my kitchen. / Let
  me / fatten you,” will happily fatten with language that sings and the
  experience of a complete world, recognizably our own but here clarified and
  reclaimed through the transformative lens of her powerful
imagination.

 By
Philip Dacey


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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