Ned Balbo

featured maryland writers

Ned Balbo’s books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize), 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), and Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize and Foreword INDIE gold medal in poetry). The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems received the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. Recent appearances include work in Attached to the Living World: a New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity U. Press) and Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology (Paraclete Press). Balbo has served as faculty for Iowa State University’s MFA program in creative writing and environment, Loyola University Maryland’s Writing Department, and for the Frost Farm and West Chester University poetry conferences. A native of Suffolk County, Long Island, he is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield and lives in Baltimore. For more, visit https://nedbalbo.com.

 

Stygian Colors

Stygian colors light the way to All or Nothing. You’re here to stay where bruise-black water meets its end— Black are the lilies you’ll take in hand close to a shore where herons cry to pitch-black blue and a fading sky. (Is this where oblivion’s herons fly?) Hide what you hold like contraband from Stygian colors— They darken and bleed but never die. The pale sun opens its yellow eye bleakly back toward the muddy land— Where negative space and cattails bend down to the marsh, both night and day bring Stygian colors . . .

“ I wrote ‘Stygian Colors’ as part of a series that used color as metaphor, in this case, hoping to conjure an apocalyptic post-climate change world. So-called 'Stygian colors' are glimpsed only under special conditions. We perceive Stygian blue after staring at bright yellow induces color fatigue in the eye’s cone cells and we then look at something black. The effect we see is a pitch-black blue so saturated that it appears as dark as black.

With that in mind, I imagined Hades’ shores as an old-fashioned photographic negative, all colors reversed (light to dark, etc.). I wrote the poem as a rondeau (see John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’), but instead of the usual order of lines, rhymes, and refrains from top to bottom, I reversed them and wrote from bottom to top.

Recently, I decided I liked the poem better as a traditional rondeau. In comparing versions, it was fascinating to think about how and why some historic forms settle into place over time because of a certain rightness to their configuration.”

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