Kate Colby’s career began with her authentic portrayal of the sublimities of life with Fruitlands (2006) for which she received a Norma Farber First Book Award, and then continued with Unbecoming Behavior (2008), part auto-biography and part revisionist biography of Jane Bowles. Beauport (2011) followed, juxtaposing memory and time against her unique understanding of her own aesthetic life. Colby continues with her examination into her contemporary life and the superficiality of the world surrounding it in The Return of the Native (2011), including the self-exploration of Unbecoming Behavior, writing on the clash between her life and her understanding of contemporary society. She explores pan-indigenous worldviews and truisms which conflict with contemporary society, seemingly attempting to connect them with society, or at least acknowledge them.

Colby uses clichés, nuances, slogans, advertisements and catch phrases to create a disjunction between reader and narrator. This is the only possible flaw of the book, as these disjunctions at times create too much separation between reader and emotion, which may deny the reader a comfort when emotions become strained and Colby’s rhetoric becomes longingly nostalgic. Conversely, the disconnect between reader and narrator is could be considered innovative, as the reader is forced to explore these emotions without the comfort of the narrator, with merely truisms such as “if you lived here you’d be home by now” (52).

Though they could be argued as a stumbling block for the reader, there is an equal amount of instances in which the disjunctions in fact create union with the agenda of the poetry. In “She Goes Out to Battle Against Depression,” Colby writes “wonder what it means/ to have been/ or to wish/ to have been/ was here” (64-8); her reference to the nostalgia of carving one’s name “was here” unites her struggle with her past and present.

Colby uses her poetry as a gateway to connect with herself; the reader seems a bystander to the writer’s awakening:

I bleed so you can
see yourself in it.
Slowly rowing
through water
lilies, a lady
reclined at the end
of a better century
begging you, please
don’t rain on my tracing paper. (7-15)

“Through the Moonlight” exemplifies Colby’s use of personal anecdote to relate to historical truisms, and in this poem she converses with multiple layers of relationships, past and present. Much of the movement in this work involves a maneuvering through layers of relationships or the intricacies between the narrator and society, indigenous people and modern worldviews, and the reader’s fluid relationship with the narrator.

In The Return of the Native Colby’s poetry feels authentic, shedding any modalities or pretentious play with linguistics, and instead allows the connected issues of herself and her poetry to assume the guiding force of the work. Colby’s works are all rich, lyrical, and authentic, and they all are quite similar. She focuses on differing nuances in each of her books, but her larger issues are the timeworn ones of identity, relationships, society, love, and materialism. However, her investigation into indigenous worldview in her latest publication adds a rich conversation to her overall body of work. The Return of the Native is beautiful piece of lyricism, despite providing very little new material to her pre-existing work.

SHANNON CUMMINGS
University of Louisiana at Lafayette