MY REVIEW OF "PRO FORMA" by James Lewis
Consider a couple of vignettes to illustrate the difference between a forced use of poetic form, and Joan Colby’s mastery.
In the first, a clumsy fellow is trying to stuff a dead horse into a square suitcase, and finds he has to bend things in un-natural ways to make them fit. Perhaps even cut off a foot to get the suitcase to close. That’s me writing formal, metrical verse.
In the second, a thoughtful woman stands in front of a wire frame of a horse. She is holding yards of colored silks, wools, cottons. She drapes the frame carefully, but with confidence, wrapping it so the colors appear to be random but always come out exactly where they need to be. When she is done, the wire frame is no longer apparent, but it is there, supporting what she has created. That is Joan Colby writing sestinas and any other form she chooses. Her “Pro Forma” collection is so well-crafted, that if not for the titles, you might well finish each poem and only later think “Wait. that was a sestina, this one is a sonnet.”
There is a gentleness to these poems, even in loss and grief. Consider these lines from “A Beautiful Funeral”.
"The marble has eroded its names
Your stillborn brother, swept away faceless
Our great grandsire whose life opened
In civil turmoil, Sherman, the dead
Burning in Georgia, bereft of funeral
Niceties; he survived to fall to this pasture.""
Joan takes the same careful approach to every poem in the collection, using form to enhance the feeling. In the opening poem, “Ending Up”, the sestinal repetitions evoke the discomfort of looking for a street, a place, wandering until someone kindly says “Avec moi” and there you are. And then enlarges the image to encompass years of life, still with a sense of wandering, and ending in a place almost like, but nothing like where she wanted to be.
Guns, ancestors, a snake pit as metaphor for an asylum. An old saying turned around to clothe the complexity of two sisters, one living, one too soon dead. Sonnets, short poems, long poems. Page after page, the softness of heart, the quiet resignation of age, the acute perceptiveness of a mature mind all come through to hold my attention. Never to the poem’s form, but to the story Joan has woven, the tactile pain and pleasure that defines us all. This is a collection to read and reread. Do it, for yourself.
Consider a couple of vignettes to illustrate the difference between a forced use of poetic form, and Joan Colby’s mastery.
In the first, a clumsy fellow is trying to stuff a dead horse into a square suitcase, and finds he has to bend things in un-natural ways to make them fit. Perhaps even cut off a foot to get the suitcase to close. That’s me writing formal, metrical verse.
In the second, a thoughtful woman stands in front of a wire frame of a horse. She is holding yards of colored silks, wools, cottons. She drapes the frame carefully, but with confidence, wrapping it so the colors appear to be random but always come out exactly where they need to be. When she is done, the wire frame is no longer apparent, but it is there, supporting what she has created. That is Joan Colby writing sestinas and any other form she chooses. Her “Pro Forma” collection is so well-crafted, that if not for the titles, you might well finish each poem and only later think “Wait. that was a sestina, this one is a sonnet.”
There is a gentleness to these poems, even in loss and grief. Consider these lines from “A Beautiful Funeral”.
"The marble has eroded its names
Your stillborn brother, swept away faceless
Our great grandsire whose life opened
In civil turmoil, Sherman, the dead
Burning in Georgia, bereft of funeral
Niceties; he survived to fall to this pasture.""
Joan takes the same careful approach to every poem in the collection, using form to enhance the feeling. In the opening poem, “Ending Up”, the sestinal repetitions evoke the discomfort of looking for a street, a place, wandering until someone kindly says “Avec moi” and there you are. And then enlarges the image to encompass years of life, still with a sense of wandering, and ending in a place almost like, but nothing like where she wanted to be.
Guns, ancestors, a snake pit as metaphor for an asylum. An old saying turned around to clothe the complexity of two sisters, one living, one too soon dead. Sonnets, short poems, long poems. Page after page, the softness of heart, the quiet resignation of age, the acute perceptiveness of a mature mind all come through to hold my attention. Never to the poem’s form, but to the story Joan has woven, the tactile pain and pleasure that defines us all. This is a collection to read and reread. Do it, for yourself.
