Review of Ribcage in misfitmagazine, Fall 2015. By Alan Catlin
oan Colby, Ribcage, Glass Lyre Press, winner of 2015 Kithara Book Prize.
Joan Colby poses the classic question that the mind/soul, is the prisoner of the body, through a series of poems that is often as astonishing, as they are revealing. Treating each body part as an object in and of itself, Colby personifies, anthropomorphizes, and rhapsodizes. Poems can be witty, as in the catalogue of the attributes of lips or the aspects of legs and kidney as punctuation marks. She relates ways in which she abused, broke, or in other ways damaged, body parts, and how, with age, they begin to fail, affect how the world is perceived. Inside us exists a whole cosmos, a veritable universe, of being that transcends the cage and becomes myth. Disease is evoked in the understated, elegiac “Coughing Up Roses”. The horrors of Whitman’s Civil War, where the limbs are piled besides the surgeon’s tent, are described in “Fit and Nervy. A logical extension of the removed body, leads us to the “Envelope of Servitude”, a litany on feet, noting that half the soldiers of the Civil War went barefoot into battle, an evocation that lead to the Chinese notion of foot binding, and later to, Byron’s club foot, and Achilles’ heel. This process of linkage, through connection of images centering upon a body part, is the key element of this ingenious grouping of poems. The second section continues the process in “The Mind at Play.” Here, if possible, the poet is even more free range, more exterior, in her focus tracing the unlimited boundaries of the imagination. Colby finds universe, within and without, and then is compelled to let it go, to disintegrate as all things must. Her brilliant poem, “Passwords” concludes,
…..I recall how my father in the years
Before he died, also became obsessed by the vast
Expanse of space, galaxies, quarks, dark
Matter. How he pondered the password
To the panorama of stardust to which he’d soon
Be returning. His identity, at last, stolen.
I am continually amazed by the brilliant, far reaching work of Joan Colby and I don’t know why I should be. It’s just business as usual for this poet.
oan Colby, Ribcage, Glass Lyre Press, winner of 2015 Kithara Book Prize.
Joan Colby poses the classic question that the mind/soul, is the prisoner of the body, through a series of poems that is often as astonishing, as they are revealing. Treating each body part as an object in and of itself, Colby personifies, anthropomorphizes, and rhapsodizes. Poems can be witty, as in the catalogue of the attributes of lips or the aspects of legs and kidney as punctuation marks. She relates ways in which she abused, broke, or in other ways damaged, body parts, and how, with age, they begin to fail, affect how the world is perceived. Inside us exists a whole cosmos, a veritable universe, of being that transcends the cage and becomes myth. Disease is evoked in the understated, elegiac “Coughing Up Roses”. The horrors of Whitman’s Civil War, where the limbs are piled besides the surgeon’s tent, are described in “Fit and Nervy. A logical extension of the removed body, leads us to the “Envelope of Servitude”, a litany on feet, noting that half the soldiers of the Civil War went barefoot into battle, an evocation that lead to the Chinese notion of foot binding, and later to, Byron’s club foot, and Achilles’ heel. This process of linkage, through connection of images centering upon a body part, is the key element of this ingenious grouping of poems. The second section continues the process in “The Mind at Play.” Here, if possible, the poet is even more free range, more exterior, in her focus tracing the unlimited boundaries of the imagination. Colby finds universe, within and without, and then is compelled to let it go, to disintegrate as all things must. Her brilliant poem, “Passwords” concludes,
…..I recall how my father in the years
Before he died, also became obsessed by the vast
Expanse of space, galaxies, quarks, dark
Matter. How he pondered the password
To the panorama of stardust to which he’d soon
Be returning. His identity, at last, stolen.
I am continually amazed by the brilliant, far reaching work of Joan Colby and I don’t know why I should be. It’s just business as usual for this poet.
