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.
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