The Wingback Chair Paperback – August 16, 2014

An insightful and beautifully written collection of poems by a leading Midwestern poet, Joan Colby.

Excellent creative writing never calls attention to itself. Instead, it provides a framework, a launch pad for the reader to fly from. It opens possibilities for individual understanding, meditation, and connection with the author. It is an open invitation to know a stranger intimately, feel their passion and their pain while acknowledging your own. This is the rhetorical RSVP that permeates Joan Colby’s book of poetry “The Wingback Chair.”Come feel with me, Joan urges us, in her deeply personal observation of watching a parent slip down the unpredictable path of dementia in the eponymous opening poem. Or come ponder the unease of end-of-life questions, the oddness that happens with serious health issues. Maybe because I’m a nurse, “Aunt Agnes” was completely real to me. Look at the stage Joan sets with two short lines to open:.“Bedridden, beneath blankets,Her leg black to the thigh.”.And in just eight stanzas, she reveals everything you need to know about family dynamics, hard decisions, and the quirkiness of life, ending with six short lines of verse that aren’t meant to simply give you a glimpse of Mother. They ask “how would you handle this? Could you handle this?”.“Agnes dies easily. Mother weepsAnd has a drink. Southern ComfortHas become a resource. The hospitalLoses Agnes’ leg; it can’t be buriedIn sanctified ground with the rest of her,And this grieves Mother more than anything.”.In my review of Joan’s chapbook “Pro Forma,” I used the analogy of an artist draping various materials on a frame to create a beautiful work. Imagine my surprise and delight to find that “The Wingback Chair” has poems where silk, linen, synthetics, wool, and lace are used in unexpected patterns and glimpses of life, love, history, and nature.Joan writes free verse as masterfully as she writes formal poetry, with an almost opposite feel. Where her formal poems deftly obscure the form on which they are based, her free verse is a bare frame on which we are invited to drape our own imagination, our own memories, our own pain. This is poetry to read aloud and share with your intimate friends.

"The Wingback Chair" once again demonstrates Joan Colby's remarkable talent for creating poems that are wide-ranging in subject matter but direct in their appeal. Her language is wonderfully evocative. Often, in the same poem, she exhibits her ability for artfully presenting a mundane subject, then setting it alight with a phrase that startlingly contrast with what has come before. Her poems continue to amaze and delight.