A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place
Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.
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Colorfast is an exquisite book. Rose McLarney looks into the hard surfaces of southern Appalachia with a scrutiny at once ferocious and patient. She lingers in a woman’s world of textiles and dyes, minerals and canning jars, and lets us feel their stubborn glinting persistence against what is worn away, what wears us away: the passage of time, the suffering we inflict on each other and ourselves, the absences we create by not seeing each other clearly. In almost every poem there’s a prayer to see—to glimpse the real value of gems and girls, slow craftwork, grief itself. Rose McLarney is rare, her vision rare, her voice holding fast to candor and wisdom, ‘finding color in the hearts of rocks.’
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Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields