Anne Colwell's moving first collection Believing Their Shadows moves in lazy elliptical spins, each poem a widening arc that unites the disintegration of a love affair, a mother's long alcoholic suicide, a father's stoic walk towards death, and moments of magic that contrast with the anger and grief over living with a hopeless alcoholic.
In “Vacation Picture” Colwell takes an inventory of her mother's adolescence, her burgeoning alcohol addiction and the flash the addiction caused. Colwell does not lay blame or slap her anger to the page, rather she takes a tender look, hoping that the fifteen year old girl in the picture can take a breath, enjoy, for a moment the blue sky and the cry of a gull, before the suffering the “debt of manlessness” and then the “red lipstick, the red flashing lights,” and later “hidden bottles and open regrets.”
Colwell works in casida, or qasida, an Arabic form of rhyming poetry, usually centered on a single subject, and Colwell centers her casidas on love, the ache of it, particularly, a lover in Seville, the nights of restless longing as she stares at the Delaware Bay “where the rollers plead like fingers.” And the landscapes of Colwell's casida's are filled with scents and “secret skin” and the airlessness of radio that offers salvation, and the speaker of these poems is like an empty socket who has come “back/ten times/ too late” and who “hear your voice in grocery stores,/luncheon counters.” Colwell's line breaks show the tension of the relationship, accentuating the speaker's mood.
Colwell's poems possess a magic and bravado that contrast to the two other dominate cycles in Believing their Shadows, love and the ghost of her mother. Whether its the angel who comes to Mary in the dark, or when the speaker rides a Centaur down Main Street in March, or a Man with a Hammer who forces “twin cataracts of starlings/ explode into the sky”. Or even her own Hamlet, this time her mother's ghost “bloated, drunk, matted hair.”
“Your hair is thin and dark caught back in a scarf.” Colwell's ear is sharp as her eye.
The women in her poems are real, strong, and equally weak for love or alcohol, and Colwell moves in history's ellipsis, first Mary, and her ruination by the angel's lovemaking, the adulteress stoned to death for love, Queen Vashti's anger, and even Anne Bradstreet, who like the poet's own parents died before what could be said and done was said and done.
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