X-Ray and the Pull of Poetry
Joan Sibley
In X-Ray and the Pull of Poetry, Joan Sibley sees her rooster, X-Ray, as the "unerring imager/of my inner being/exact examiner/of my private wars." He was the judge and jury of the joys, mysteries and terrors of her life. Her "private wars" were many, but her poetry was a lifeline between her inner being and her outer landscape, elegant in voice and language, rich in irony and imagery, sometimes comedic, often dark in the light. Sibley mined thought and emotion in her deepest consciousness. And it was through poetry that she was able to make sense of a world in which she felt she did not belong.
Joan Sibley
In X-Ray and the Pull of Poetry, Joan Sibley sees her rooster, X-Ray, as the "unerring imager/of my inner being/exact examiner/of my private wars." He was the judge and jury of the joys, mysteries and terrors of her life. Her "private wars" were many, but her poetry was a lifeline between her inner being and her outer landscape, elegant in voice and language, rich in irony and imagery, sometimes comedic, often dark in the light. Sibley mined thought and emotion in her deepest consciousness. And it was through poetry that she was able to make sense of a world in which she felt she did not belong.
Joan Sibley
In X-Ray and the Pull of Poetry, Joan Sibley sees her rooster, X-Ray, as the "unerring imager/of my inner being/exact examiner/of my private wars." He was the judge and jury of the joys, mysteries and terrors of her life. Her "private wars" were many, but her poetry was a lifeline between her inner being and her outer landscape, elegant in voice and language, rich in irony and imagery, sometimes comedic, often dark in the light. Sibley mined thought and emotion in her deepest consciousness. And it was through poetry that she was able to make sense of a world in which she felt she did not belong.
Joan Sibley was born in Worcester, Mass. on February 17, 1939 to an older couple whose world of quiet Victorian manners, class and privilege shaped Joan's early life. Her mother was coolly distant, and Joan soon felt her disappointment and rejection. A creative child, drawn to the life of the imagination and joy in nature and wildlife, she slowly composed a world of her own. She attended Boston University, where she studied with Robert Lowell; Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were two of her classmates. Later, she migrated to a small hamlet in Vermont and lived there for the rest of her life in a cabin with only a wood stove for heat. Although she was, basically, a recluse, she joined a local poetry group and continued to write her poems until her death at 74 on December 16, 2013.
A Boston native, Martha Herbert Izzi lived in Shrewsbury, Vermont for thirty years. In that time she and her husband owned a small ruminant farm. She wrote for Cornell's Small Farm Quarterly, the Rutland Business Journal and occasionally the Boston Business Journal. In 2012 she started a Shrewsbury poetry writing group that nurtured many creative people in Shrewsbury, including Joan Sibley.
Penelope Weiss grew up in New York City and now lives in Shrewsbury, Vermont. Storiana, her collection of stories, was published by Casa de Snapdragon Publishing and is available on Amazon. Her poems have been published in Otoliths, Dream Catcher, Right-Hand Pointing, and Star82. She was also part of the poetry writing group in Shrewsbury created by Martha Izzi.