Scott Whitaker Reviews
from Broadkill Review
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems from FutureCycle
Press, is a fresh selected collection gathering Colby’s work
from the late 1970s through the present. A midwestern
practicality forms the backbone of these poems, from the
history of work, family, and the land. She is a poet with a
place and something to say about it. A poet of rural life, a
peasant, perhaps, a welcome voice among the masses of
poetry nation.
I like watching the poet’s music change over the
course of years which reveals itself in a collection such as
with Colby’s. The music of the syllables take turns, puts on
new keys, dresses up in a new mode, and saunters back
with a fresher voice, the poet’s newer work. Anne Sexton
once said that poet’s always prefer their newest work,
something I personally identify with, and I wonder if Colby
does too. Colby’s newest work flashes and crackles with
urgency. Danger lurks in her landscape in forms of hunger,
death, and drought.
“A dark wind batters the door./Our minds unchink as/
the chimney roars and the eaves/shriek in their rusty
dreams.” In “Rose Red to Snow White” Colby channels a
dark sexual energy and the language comes up and behaves
like a blond girl in a thriller movie, always looking
back. You can see the speaker and the words themselves
turn around and watch for the beast breaking ot in the
wood. “Something is snapping in the Applewood” and danger
is a blizzard, danger is a bear, danger is a lust for wildness.
In “Lunar Year” Colby wears the moons of the year,
and the images of a stark hunger and of predator and prey
put into perspective our human follies. Really, Colby winks
at us, is our notion of what to do with a life centered
around beauty or politics or money? We could easily be savage,
hunting daily to live, marked for a kill by a predator
lurking out of our line of sight? There isn’t that much that
separates the world from the wilderness, Colby reminds us,
we’re still close.
The danger felt in many of the later poems are present
in moments from the older works. But Colby is a poet
of pasture and grain. Her language comes from the earth
and all the dark that dwells in that earth, worm, mud, and
snake. The collection opens with a poem rooted in nature,
the weather, and family, the language of horses and fields.
“Morning in Late October” reminds the reader that we live
in nature’s language, as she and her son set out on horseback
in the early cold, “the new moon still hanging in the
slate blue east/like a parenthesis.” In later work “Chickens
scratch a pointless calligraphy,” and Colby employs this
metaphor time and time again. Coupled with lush and
hard syllables of rural life that Colby rubs together like a
farmer’s hands trying to warm up, Colby’s voice is one of
the American Romantic.
Colby’s experience with horses and farms and work
bring a working class rhythm to her work. In the early
poems, as well as later gems, the poet finds her way
through the natural world. In “White Lilacs” nature itself
guides the poet, “it points at me/standing in May twilight/
with barbed wire hooking the darkness.” And later,
“The white lilacs tremble/as I tremble.” The identification
of the poet with nature is a song as old as poetry.
Colby’s world is not the natural splendor of a haiku, nor
is it the reed of a Chinese poem, Colby works towards her
own foot, and her poems consistently skew towards short
lines, short poems. You can almost imagine her swinging
bales of hay for her horses to feed, or scattering corn for
chickens.
Colby fights off death, and
stands up to it throughout the
collection. The intimacy of a
dying colt, or even a divorce is
written in sharp detail. Experience
adds to the poems rustic
authenticity. She knows the
farmers she describes, and
when Colby puts on a personae,
as she does so well, she wears
the mask of killers, madwomen,
and lovers with equal grace and
authority as she does when she
is writing about a harsh winter,
or an ox ploughing a field.
Peasant life puts into focus the joy of simple living
and the joy of work. But Colby can also wield mystic poetry,
lines that capture the shimmering joy of life. In this
case, best represented by her ekphrasis poetry inspired
by the surrealist Mark Chagall. Colby composes “Peasant
Life,” about the painting of the same name (Google images
brings up all the Chagall poems Colby has written
poems about) and she could easily be talking about her
own life, or at the very least rural life in general. “Feed
sugar beets to the white horse,/ dance on the blue mountain,”
the poem begins with the order to work followed up
by an order to play. The simple pleasure of dancing on
the mountain side is followed by the more surreal, “Let
the little horse/draw your grandfather up to the moon.”
Easily death, easily dream, easily the image of working
at night on some necessary chore. Colby doesn’t tell us
what she means, she doesn’t have to. Later in the poem
she confirm the toughness of her characters, “Your red
cap and pug nose/prepare to tackle anything...Let a tree
grow in your mind...it is your life ahead of you.” The
happy full life of work and family combined with the majesty
of the natural world meet in Colby’s lines. You can
feel her passion for them, they shimmer, and stand up to
old man death, which waits for us all.
— SW
Review of Properties of Matter by Cindy Hochman, Editor First Literary Review-East
Joan Colby’s poems are fragile as whispers, and yet, each line is a plaintive and powerful howl. This poet speaks the language of uninhibited nature merging with fragile/fallible body, in haunting and urgent imagery that will leave you gasping for breath. For Ms. Colby, night unravels a mysterious sky full of dark bruises, pulsing winds, and essence of moon. The poems contained in “Properties of Matter” come from a deep place, and are utterly compelling in their embrace of the world’s darkness, and our own.
from Broadkill Review
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems
Joan Colby’s Selected Poems from FutureCycle
Press, is a fresh selected collection gathering Colby’s work
from the late 1970s through the present. A midwestern
practicality forms the backbone of these poems, from the
history of work, family, and the land. She is a poet with a
place and something to say about it. A poet of rural life, a
peasant, perhaps, a welcome voice among the masses of
poetry nation.
I like watching the poet’s music change over the
course of years which reveals itself in a collection such as
with Colby’s. The music of the syllables take turns, puts on
new keys, dresses up in a new mode, and saunters back
with a fresher voice, the poet’s newer work. Anne Sexton
once said that poet’s always prefer their newest work,
something I personally identify with, and I wonder if Colby
does too. Colby’s newest work flashes and crackles with
urgency. Danger lurks in her landscape in forms of hunger,
death, and drought.
“A dark wind batters the door./Our minds unchink as/
the chimney roars and the eaves/shriek in their rusty
dreams.” In “Rose Red to Snow White” Colby channels a
dark sexual energy and the language comes up and behaves
like a blond girl in a thriller movie, always looking
back. You can see the speaker and the words themselves
turn around and watch for the beast breaking ot in the
wood. “Something is snapping in the Applewood” and danger
is a blizzard, danger is a bear, danger is a lust for wildness.
In “Lunar Year” Colby wears the moons of the year,
and the images of a stark hunger and of predator and prey
put into perspective our human follies. Really, Colby winks
at us, is our notion of what to do with a life centered
around beauty or politics or money? We could easily be savage,
hunting daily to live, marked for a kill by a predator
lurking out of our line of sight? There isn’t that much that
separates the world from the wilderness, Colby reminds us,
we’re still close.
The danger felt in many of the later poems are present
in moments from the older works. But Colby is a poet
of pasture and grain. Her language comes from the earth
and all the dark that dwells in that earth, worm, mud, and
snake. The collection opens with a poem rooted in nature,
the weather, and family, the language of horses and fields.
“Morning in Late October” reminds the reader that we live
in nature’s language, as she and her son set out on horseback
in the early cold, “the new moon still hanging in the
slate blue east/like a parenthesis.” In later work “Chickens
scratch a pointless calligraphy,” and Colby employs this
metaphor time and time again. Coupled with lush and
hard syllables of rural life that Colby rubs together like a
farmer’s hands trying to warm up, Colby’s voice is one of
the American Romantic.
Colby’s experience with horses and farms and work
bring a working class rhythm to her work. In the early
poems, as well as later gems, the poet finds her way
through the natural world. In “White Lilacs” nature itself
guides the poet, “it points at me/standing in May twilight/
with barbed wire hooking the darkness.” And later,
“The white lilacs tremble/as I tremble.” The identification
of the poet with nature is a song as old as poetry.
Colby’s world is not the natural splendor of a haiku, nor
is it the reed of a Chinese poem, Colby works towards her
own foot, and her poems consistently skew towards short
lines, short poems. You can almost imagine her swinging
bales of hay for her horses to feed, or scattering corn for
chickens.
Colby fights off death, and
stands up to it throughout the
collection. The intimacy of a
dying colt, or even a divorce is
written in sharp detail. Experience
adds to the poems rustic
authenticity. She knows the
farmers she describes, and
when Colby puts on a personae,
as she does so well, she wears
the mask of killers, madwomen,
and lovers with equal grace and
authority as she does when she
is writing about a harsh winter,
or an ox ploughing a field.
Peasant life puts into focus the joy of simple living
and the joy of work. But Colby can also wield mystic poetry,
lines that capture the shimmering joy of life. In this
case, best represented by her ekphrasis poetry inspired
by the surrealist Mark Chagall. Colby composes “Peasant
Life,” about the painting of the same name (Google images
brings up all the Chagall poems Colby has written
poems about) and she could easily be talking about her
own life, or at the very least rural life in general. “Feed
sugar beets to the white horse,/ dance on the blue mountain,”
the poem begins with the order to work followed up
by an order to play. The simple pleasure of dancing on
the mountain side is followed by the more surreal, “Let
the little horse/draw your grandfather up to the moon.”
Easily death, easily dream, easily the image of working
at night on some necessary chore. Colby doesn’t tell us
what she means, she doesn’t have to. Later in the poem
she confirm the toughness of her characters, “Your red
cap and pug nose/prepare to tackle anything...Let a tree
grow in your mind...it is your life ahead of you.” The
happy full life of work and family combined with the majesty
of the natural world meet in Colby’s lines. You can
feel her passion for them, they shimmer, and stand up to
old man death, which waits for us all.
— SW
Review of Properties of Matter by Cindy Hochman, Editor First Literary Review-East
Joan Colby’s poems are fragile as whispers, and yet, each line is a plaintive and powerful howl. This poet speaks the language of uninhibited nature merging with fragile/fallible body, in haunting and urgent imagery that will leave you gasping for breath. For Ms. Colby, night unravels a mysterious sky full of dark bruises, pulsing winds, and essence of moon. The poems contained in “Properties of Matter” come from a deep place, and are utterly compelling in their embrace of the world’s darkness, and our own.
