Selected Poems by Joan Colby, published by FutureCycle Press, 2013, 134 pages
by Christina Zawadiwsky
Poetry is a form of magic, and when Joan Colby waves her wand the human essence appears. In her poem The Magician
Whenever the magician snaps his fingers
a man and a woman lie down together.
The man is lost in love.
The women winks.
and eventually
They want the commonplace
to be extraordinary.
The magician obliges.
The man and the woman fall in love.
It lasts.
In Joan Colby's poetry, the commonplace always rises to the level of the extraordinary through her use of language, as in the poem Flights.
The cardinal wings the early morning
a red question flashing
in and out of leaves.
At noon, the hawk
stabs the sign of the cross
black in the heavens.
Crows at dusk
scatter up like ashes
from the sun's bonfire.
The great horned owl
glides into midnight
on feathers of silence.
We spread our arms
nothing nothing
so we roost in each other.
and in History of the World
You can remember how the moon laid its white
finger across your lips as you slept,
how a child guards its secrets,
the shoebox of feathers and stones.
Inspiration for the magic can come from anywhere. Here's part of a poem about a painting by Chagall. Song of Songs.
The man creeps headfirst out of the bed of roses.
This is how beautiful women
are taken unawares.
They sleep above Byzantine cities
while a severed hand
grasps for the moon.
The woman dreans of
an empty throne. She dreams a king
with wings is playing a golden harp.
Living on this earth with all of its difficulties, including the lives of animals, are also touched by Colby's magic. In Two Deaths "The hurt owl/in the gravel roadway shifts/From one claw to the other/The iris of one eye splattered/Like ink on yellow/Cellophane" and "The colt sprawls in the sun/In a dome of flies./Sudden violent twistings, then/Collapse. His huge dark eye/Moist as a grape, rolls/In terror." In Ox Team at Garfield Farm "It was oxen/tat opened the west/Able to live on almost nothing./To unmoor the mired cart/Plod all day in patience."
The magic unfolds through a great love of life (including its tragedies). Colby quickly lights the kerosene of living with her magic flame, illuminating for us what we have not seen before. She tells us in The boundary Waters that "The wilderness/breathes at my back/like a vast black animal/that will never be tamed/by legend." and "Looking straight up/the channel of tall birch,/I see the white inviolate/bonfire of one star."
To Colby all experiences are potentially magical because they breathe life and fire into us, and her words reflect those moments where thoughts are intense, ecstatic or despairing, but never threaded with boredom. In Barnfire she tells us that "Each story is a myth /in which someone discovers fire/And the it all begins."
This book is about a life of reality and wonder, sacrifice and hoodwink, marvel and the natural world's mysteries, all seen through the lens of a unclouded eye focused outwards. A word witch who's never afraid of the darkness, Joan Colby takes that darkness and spins it into invaluable intellectual and emotional gold, the gold of human fairy tales. Her interpretation of why we are alive will keep our hearts perpetually beating. We are those who return, as in the poem Penance, "hair wild as a flock of startled birds/your eyes red as an arroyo/carved by tears." and she 'll take us in and let us "lie down on silk" the silk of her poetry, no matter what we've been experiencing or where we've been, since to enter Colby's world is to be surrounded with her magic.
Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist, critic and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment For The Arts award, two Wisconsin Arts Board awards, a Co-Ordinating Council Of Literary Magazines Award and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards and a Commitment To Community Television Award. She is a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology (and has received one herself), the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, has published books of poetry and has had poetry and fiction in hundreds of literary periodicals. She has reviewed music for Music Room Reviews, films for Movie Room Reviews, Movie Scribes, and FilmSay, and books and films for Book Room Reviews. She also shows her original visual artwork professionally.
by Christina Zawadiwsky
Poetry is a form of magic, and when Joan Colby waves her wand the human essence appears. In her poem The Magician
Whenever the magician snaps his fingers
a man and a woman lie down together.
The man is lost in love.
The women winks.
and eventually
They want the commonplace
to be extraordinary.
The magician obliges.
The man and the woman fall in love.
It lasts.
In Joan Colby's poetry, the commonplace always rises to the level of the extraordinary through her use of language, as in the poem Flights.
The cardinal wings the early morning
a red question flashing
in and out of leaves.
At noon, the hawk
stabs the sign of the cross
black in the heavens.
Crows at dusk
scatter up like ashes
from the sun's bonfire.
The great horned owl
glides into midnight
on feathers of silence.
We spread our arms
nothing nothing
so we roost in each other.
and in History of the World
You can remember how the moon laid its white
finger across your lips as you slept,
how a child guards its secrets,
the shoebox of feathers and stones.
Inspiration for the magic can come from anywhere. Here's part of a poem about a painting by Chagall. Song of Songs.
The man creeps headfirst out of the bed of roses.
This is how beautiful women
are taken unawares.
They sleep above Byzantine cities
while a severed hand
grasps for the moon.
The woman dreans of
an empty throne. She dreams a king
with wings is playing a golden harp.
Living on this earth with all of its difficulties, including the lives of animals, are also touched by Colby's magic. In Two Deaths "The hurt owl/in the gravel roadway shifts/From one claw to the other/The iris of one eye splattered/Like ink on yellow/Cellophane" and "The colt sprawls in the sun/In a dome of flies./Sudden violent twistings, then/Collapse. His huge dark eye/Moist as a grape, rolls/In terror." In Ox Team at Garfield Farm "It was oxen/tat opened the west/Able to live on almost nothing./To unmoor the mired cart/Plod all day in patience."
The magic unfolds through a great love of life (including its tragedies). Colby quickly lights the kerosene of living with her magic flame, illuminating for us what we have not seen before. She tells us in The boundary Waters that "The wilderness/breathes at my back/like a vast black animal/that will never be tamed/by legend." and "Looking straight up/the channel of tall birch,/I see the white inviolate/bonfire of one star."
To Colby all experiences are potentially magical because they breathe life and fire into us, and her words reflect those moments where thoughts are intense, ecstatic or despairing, but never threaded with boredom. In Barnfire she tells us that "Each story is a myth /in which someone discovers fire/And the it all begins."
This book is about a life of reality and wonder, sacrifice and hoodwink, marvel and the natural world's mysteries, all seen through the lens of a unclouded eye focused outwards. A word witch who's never afraid of the darkness, Joan Colby takes that darkness and spins it into invaluable intellectual and emotional gold, the gold of human fairy tales. Her interpretation of why we are alive will keep our hearts perpetually beating. We are those who return, as in the poem Penance, "hair wild as a flock of startled birds/your eyes red as an arroyo/carved by tears." and she 'll take us in and let us "lie down on silk" the silk of her poetry, no matter what we've been experiencing or where we've been, since to enter Colby's world is to be surrounded with her magic.
Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist, critic and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment For The Arts award, two Wisconsin Arts Board awards, a Co-Ordinating Council Of Literary Magazines Award and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards and a Commitment To Community Television Award. She is a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology (and has received one herself), the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, has published books of poetry and has had poetry and fiction in hundreds of literary periodicals. She has reviewed music for Music Room Reviews, films for Movie Room Reviews, Movie Scribes, and FilmSay, and books and films for Book Room Reviews. She also shows her original visual artwork professionally.