American Book Review

It’s a special pleasure to be reading Colette Inez’s new book, The Luba Poems, her eleventh collection, while on a residency in southern France. French, after all, was her first language, and these poems exude the joi de vivre of the sunniest regions of that country.

I recall inviting Colette to a class of poetry students in 1983, which was the year of her third book of poems, Eight Minutes from the Sun. She read with warmth and careful emphasis, illuminating aspects within the work, and she won the class over with her alert and somewhat quirky intelligence, equally elements of her poetry. Eight Minutes from the Sun is full of love poems and all the books since share that particular emphasis—love as a measure of our lives, be it domestic or otherwise. This current book, as was the case in earlier books, is dedicated to her husband and life partner, Saul.

In that third book, in the poem, “The Hunter’s Game Wife,” the author writes “When the dry season comes to crack/our dirt road, I am your lady of the well/with a dipper of starry water. I share/ your quarry of empty days.” Emotional complexity abounds in this poetry; a “dry season” and “empty days” sit at one pole and are challenged by the saviour “lady of the well,” one of many familiar myth-laden figures in this poet’s work, and her “starry water.” The recognition of opposites gives the poetry ambiguity, and this provides a sense of distance.

Many poets as they get older write with the gravity of ends in sight. Meditations on mortality seem just about inevitable. But now, here comes Luba, Inez’s most zesty persona whose reflections are primarily about life and sensory experience. While most are third person presentations, we nonetheless hear Luba’s voice and feel her being: quicksilver, lithe, and the epitome of rhythm, wit and erotic passion.

The spirit of this lyric poetry is struck immediately in the first poem,

The Lost NameWhen the name          Luba lifts awaylike a leaf in hard rain          or goes missingfrom its cage—          a parakeet not answeringor a scrap of light          snagged by a cloud,it must puff up, fueled by desire          of the one who callsyet may mosey like a sailboat          with the tide to dock at laston the tongue, or simply pop,          a cork, a bottle cap.Luba, a candied apple at a carnival, Lu lu, bah bah,          pop-up tart, mon amour.

Exuberance in this playful, subtly joyous poem is held in place by the designed poetic structure as well as the cloud that snags the “scrap of light.” The long controlled sentence undulates above the poem’s final two lines.

Along with the portrait of Luba that emerges poem by poem, are the supporting themes that unify the sequence: music, the natural world, the sky above and the myths that name the constellations. She’s kin to the Seven Sisters in “The Woman Who Looks Up.”

Dizzy with earth’s velocity, her penny-saver day-to-day, she asks you to notice her as more than she appears – neck strained like an astronomer horse when she resolves the Pleiades from haze to pail of abundant stars.

Music—jazz and classical—plays throughout. In the entertaining “Luba Looks at a Menu and Thinks of Music,” Luba toys with the image of Yehudi Menuhin’s violin and then dances to the music of Brazil:

Rio de JaneiroPortuguese pianosmenus in Brazilyehuyehu yehhudihudihuLu ba

It’s difficult, and perhaps not necessary, to sum up or construct a neat portrait of Luba, though words like sensual, open, passionate, original apply; it’s the ineffable within the portrait that puts the reader in a spell. For instance, “The Queen of Radishes” opens, “One mad wheel turning the chaise of a queen./It’s for Luba, the queen of radishes/in a scarlet cloak.” She rides that wheel, and the poem...