The Way Home: On the Poetry of Colette Inez, Edited by Kevin Bezner
Colette
Inez is the author of eight poetry collections including the award-winning
The Woman Who Loved Worms (Doubleday & Co., 1972, reissued
by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992). She has also published Family
Life, 1988, and Getting Under Way: New & Selected Poetry,
1993, both from Story Line Press. Her most recent collection, Clemency,
came out in 1998 (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and her memoir, The
Secret of M. Dulong, will be published by the University of Wisconsin
Press in 2004.
As the illegitimate daughter of a priest and a scholar, Inez was rejected by a father ordained the year of her birth and a mother Inez suggests was too isolated a person to have raised a child, a woman in awe of her lover but not in love with him. Within ten days of her birth, Inez was placed in a Catholic orphanage, where she suffered deprivation. She learned harsher lessons when sent to live with alcoholic and abusive foster parents in the United States at the age of eight. In her remarkable poetry, Inez has explored this story with wit, haunting feeling, and memorable storytelling. InezÍs story starts in Europe, but it continues in America. While she created a response to the world her parents gave her„and in doing so transformed them and herself into literary characters in the story she was compelled to tell„she eventually won clemency from that story, as she calls it, and transformed herself in the process. In the act of transforming herself, Inez turned to art, nature here on earth and in the sky, cultures far different from her own, and the love of her husband„all of which, in addition to the story of her parents, make up the themes of her poetry. We return to her poetry again and again because of her indomitable spirit, her endurance and acceptance, her love of life and language, and her remarkable joy.
About the Editor
Kevin Bezner, a widely published poet and critic, is editor of The Wilderness of Vision: On the Poetry of John Haines (Story Line Press, 1996). He holds a doctorate in English from Ohio University.
$18.00, 124 pages, ISBN: 0-9717371-3-4