“Let This Be Understanding”

A Review of Nadia Colburn’s I Say The Sky

In his book Story of a Poem, Matthew Zapruder writes, “A poem is not mere reportage. It is an enactment of a relationship between consciousness and the world” (136). In her most recent poetry collection, I Say The Sky, Nadia Colburn quietly reveals her honest and grace-filled relationship with the world. Through her contemplative and evocative poems, she invites the reader to join her in exploring the wounds and joys of being fully human.   

The collection’s six sections cover a range of expansive topics: permanent life changes, the experiences of motherhood, memories of abuse, self-love and self-acceptance, and a recognition and love of the world (both human and more than human).  

Colburn’s opening poem, “I Think It Is Such A Beautiful” (referencing the dawn), recognizes that even the most beautiful moments are fleeting. The author grounds the focus of the poem with detailed images: the daffodils that bloom early, the names of individuals that are gone, and the “marching clouds,” methane leaks” and “...whales/suffering the piercing/sounds of boats...” (3) Colburn’s poems stay grounded in the particular, while letting the images and the speaker’s imagination lead the reader into moments of discovery about themselves and the world the poems inhabit.  

The writing is exquisite and sparing; every word matters. While many of the poems are about ordinary life issues, the beauty of the images gently draws the reader with clarity, subtlety, and sound. In “Uplifting,” she creates a picture of geese flying north, pigeons on the street, and the “sky blackened by starlings.” And then the poem turns:  

 “Now three billion birds are missing.//We wake to so many forms of emptiness;/so much loss greets us in our sleep.//In my childhood, I thought the world I’d entered/would be the one I’d exit.” (5)   

Colburn lulls the reader in and then startles them with observations and images that move beyond complacency to engage with the issue of the missing birds.  

In “Smaller Than Last Time,” she writes of witnessing the approaching death of two different people and invites us to contemplate our preoccupations that prevent us from being fully invested in our own lives and in the lives of others: “I want so badly to live sometimes I forget/that I am alive. That this is enough –/even the fear, the regrets....” (8).  

Colburn doesn’t shy away from sensitive subject matters. In “The End of History,” she writes of ecological loss, the horror of man’s inhumanity to others, and at the same time, the beauty of a blue sky filled with nimbus clouds. This is a recurring theme, as several poems juxtapose this existential question of how one lives with suffering and joy simultaneously. How does one face personal terror and traumas, the specter of war, and ecological deaths (“...bees falling from the skies....The fish gorge themselves on plastic”)  – while also recognizing beauty and our love of this world? One poem is aptly titled “Amid So Much Suffering, Do I Dare To Be Happy?”, and weaves both together.   

...Joy, beauty, thanks  

on the long path   

through the meadows   

where the forests burned...  

old minefields,   

oil fields, we make   

our journey; on and on we go,   

again stumbling into love. (73) 

Where other poets may use graphic descriptions to relay trauma, Colburn only alludes to it with subtle images and lets those images and the silence surrounding them speak for her.  

In the last stanza of “Memory,” she writes:   

And the body, remembering  

what it does not want to know,   

nevertheless calls itself back,   

away from the other voices,   

to the little space, hardly a space at all,   

the little hard nodule   

of silence, that stone in the soil. (30)  

The speaker communicates the truth of how trauma sits within a body, even if the mind and spirit don’t want to or can’t remember. For example, the “hard nodule/of silence, that stone...” are two images repeated in poems within the book's third section. Colburn speaks truth about our relationship with time and memories. Although we consider the past separate from today, that isn’t how the body and mind work. As she wisely states: “...The past is the past//and the present the present except//for the ways it isn’t. And I was safe//except for the ways I wasn’t. And even into this/moment,//the ink spreads –//out from the very center of the dark, here//into this kitchen, this poem.” (32) 

 She uses the image of stone to convey silence, the stillness that one can hold within a body, a heaviness, and a suppression of emotions. In “Stone Girl,” Colburn uses repetition to convey the heaviness and silence:  “Stone Girl//with the stone face./The stone throat. Stone hands. Stone feet./See inbetween, she is also stone and does not speak...” (34) 

 Yet even here, Colburn is gentle. The poem ends with the question: “O: silence. What from you, wants to emerge?” It is as if the poet knows that only a light touch, a gentle opening will allow the little girl to emerge to speak into the silence. And then the speaker does indeed speak in the following poems. The section ends with “Know,” a short poem of five couplets that is itself a repetition of the five couplets that end the prior poem.   

 There is an arc to the poems that starts with the speaker in the poem 4 a.m., followed by poems that show steady movement toward acceptance as the speaker examines the past, love for her family, and the world in which she lives. In the poem “Outside the Sparrows Are Awake,” Colburn conveys a shift in how she sees the world as she begins a new day:  

“Outside the Sparrows Are Awake”  

and all the complications in my heart:  

I, who did not know how to love  

my own body, who mistook  

the world for a task. Listen:  

one voice and then another   

amid the rustling of the leaves. (51) 

There is a compassion present in Colburn’s poems toward the world and all of its reality and toward the reader. The poems convey a sense of understanding for both the speaker and the reader. Over the course of the book, Colburn communicates a journey toward reconciliation and self-acceptance:  

 “I think I am ready//to open my arms/right here in my own house//to receive myself, to receive the sacred/of this particular human form//on this wet day in November, the last of the leaves/ready to drop – rust, blood, brown.” (80-81)  

 Colburn effectively uses questions and different pronouns in her poems to draw the reader into a conversation with the writing. The use of the pronoun “you,” in particular, opens up the possibility that the person being addressed is not only the speaker but the reader, as well. This is literally the title of the last poem of the book: “You, who were so quiet, didn’t you know/there was a symphony inside you?” (84)   

Colburn’s collection ends with the hope that there is more to this world than one can see. That there is still beauty to be celebrated (and time to take action). The last word of the collection is “still,”  

...Didn’t you hear the calling  

from your stillness, as if you had looked out  

over calm waters to see the geese  

rise up in unison in front of the setting sun?  

Such a squall of color!  

And your whole being given  

to the one who rests in the great upflapping,  

the geese mounting higher and higher  

into the evening growing brighter and louder, still –  

The dash following the word calls out to the reader that the story is not complete, that there is still reason for hope.