Val Witte reviews Kate Colby’s Beauport, new from Litmus Press.

“What if history had really happened?” This question permeates Kate Colby’s forthcoming book of poetry, Beauport, a work that perhaps more than anything else calls into question our relationship to a past we are often nostalgic for but can never fully understand. What is true and what is fiction—will we ever know the difference? In her exploration of these questions, Colby catalogs a series of past disasters and atrocities, potential calamities, and misrepresentations of events. She shows us that the past we so often long for may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

In the world of Beauport, inhabitants and tellers of the past cannot always be trusted——nor, indeed, can the speaker herself: “All these things I’ve made you believe about me are true.” As a reader, I feel pleasantly tricked by this line, as it betrays the sense of manipulation exercised throughout the book—what are we to believe, really? Should we believe the speaker’s own thoughts any more than we believe the “facts” and “histories” relayed here?

In the past Colby presents, there are flawed recollections and erroneous understandings of reality—a woman paints a scene of children, erasing the ethnicity of one of her subjects; a man believes it is in the process of falling asleep, rather than sleep itself, that one rests; there’s the once-accepted notion that the world is flat; and the acknowledgment that in living off the land at Walden Pond, Thoreau was essentially sponging off his neighbors.

There are anecdotes of things that might have happened or could have happened—notably, the story of a teacher who takes her students to a train track and instructs them to lean against the track so that they can hear the approaching train in the distance. Only, in this instance, the train is not in the distance but bearing down upon them, forcing the children to scurry away to safety.

Even in tellings of historic disasters and atrocities—some, according to the speaker, better left forgotten—the Donner Party tragedy, the Salem witch trials, and American slavery—we are led to appreciate their historical significance, and to take pleasure in the language used in depicting them. But perhaps most notable are tragedies of a more personal nature:

I did once love someone

who told me that

he and some other boys would climb onto a roof over Main Street and cast clam-baited hooks into the air, where the seagulls would catch and swallow them. The boys would then fly the gulls like kites over Main Street. The dying birds would have seen the harbor and returning travelers, their compatriots swarming like flies over fish heads with eyes in them, fish tails, the dilapidated Manufactory…

contrails, line breaks
In the sky, dawning
discontinuous

high over Eastern Point
where they top the trees
in privilege of the view

I come back to this scene over and over—it’s a dark, disturbing image—yet one of great beauty as well. Is it possible to read of the boys’ killing of these birds without also acknowledging the glory of the birds’ final moments soaring through the sky as they watch their fellow gulls flying through the harbor? Moreover, the speaker’s love for the boy doesn’t seem diminished by his childhood misdeeds. And as readers we sense the longing for this earlier time, like so many other moments in this book. Colby has a gift for making the ugly beautiful; the menacing exciting, glorious. Nothing is seen from one perspective but rather through multiple lenses, for both its darkness and elegance, shame and intrigue. After all, the speaker says, after describing the complicated nature of the gulls’ and her relationship’s demise: “that’s love for you.”

In the end we are very much in the present, as the speaker describes her love for her dog—his soft fur, the sound of his tail thumping when he sees her in the morning, the feel of his breath on her hand. But the joy of the book is getting there—by exploring the intricacies of a flawed, mysterious— unknowable—past.

Kate Colby and Linus