Poetry. Finalist for the 2010 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award in Poetry. Kate Colby's BEAUPORT opens windows framing history framing natural and unnatural settings (traffic, waves, skylines, sky). The work presents a series of displacements, smoke and mirror memory experiments, stitching together with anachronism the physical and the metaphysical. This is a fascinating book, composing and collapsing (wing, telescope), foregrounding subject, object and sightlines in between. With its architecture of vignettes, lullabies, hymns and fragments, Colby's BEAUPORT constructs resistances, ever confronting its considered grace and precision in ripples of savory humors--Norma Cole.
With a fine intelligence and a subtle ear Colby tracks both instabilities and possibilities, the map that is but broken shreds and the shreds that can become a map.--Rosmarie Waldrop
In BEAUPORT, Kate Colby tells the tale of the decorator and designer Henry Davis Sleeper, braiding in prose-lyric reminiscences of her own New England upbringing and 'anti-ekphrastic' poems after Currier & Ives lithographs of the Victorian-era leisure class. This is Colby's 'sotted nineteenth century, ' peopled with antique glass buoys and 'animate dioramas, ' where the sound of seagulls dropping quahogs on the roof echoes all day. Not since Charles Olson's Maximus has Gloucester been so gallantly and aptly sung!--Julian T. Brolaski
These are poems of quiet beauty, wielding power through lovely simplicity. They wander through ideas and memories, they explore what is lost and what is learned in the process of becoming a person...--Angela Veronica Wong
A book that is both lyrical and conversational. A book that always feels in the present. There's beautiful music throughout...Ultimately, BEAUPORT will set you adrift with beautiful imagery and haunting questions that will linger long after the book is finished...--Stephen Karl
