If You Have to Go
Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The transformative new book from “one of the most important American poets at work today” (Dunya Mikhail)
I am content because before me looms the hope of love.
I do not have it; I do not yet have it.
It is a bird strong enough to lead me by the rope it bites;
unless I pull, it is strong enough for me.
I do worry the end of my days might come
and I will not yet have it. But even then I will be brave
upon my deathbed, and why shouldn’t I be?
I held things here, and I felt them.
—From “Psalm 40”
The poems in Katie Ford’s fourth collection implore their audience—the divine and the human—for attention, for revelation, and, perhaps above all, for companionship. The extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood—in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss—these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” In song and in silence, Ford inhabits the rooms of anguish and redemption with scouring exactness. This is poetry that “can break open, // it can break your life, it will break you // until you remain.” If You Have to Go is Ford’s most luminous and moving collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ford (Blood Lyrics) explores and performs the work of mourning in her fourth collection, which traces the dissolution of a relationship and a home. She begins by locating grief within and around the body, which "is now the house, the rooftop, the lake and the lotus." Ford writes, "I am everywhere and the fear, when it desires/ to grow, grows continental, drifting,/ torn, submerged." Ford patiently explores the topography and scale of this fear in a series of 39 sonnets, which connect in a crownlike procession and which variously address the self, the reader, love, grief, and God. A description of horses carved on a "ten-toothed comb" opens a conversation about desire that runs through the collection, with the speaker later admitting, "I can't even know if the horses are for me/ or against me, of me or in me,/ beside or despite me." Given Ford's formal tightness, the verse occasionally feels stiff or overcomposed, but the emotional resonance remains constant, with grief lightened by such auspicious moments as when the speaker declares, "I am content because before me looms the hope of love." Ford makes sense of sorrow by way of poetry, granting verse "its truth since through its door/ I might grow a new home."
