Katie Ford's ruminative poetry collection If You Have to Go transforms a failed marriage into soul-searching art.
Ford (Blood Lyrics) divides her collection into four parts, with parts one and three containing a single poem each. The first poem, "In the Hearth," sets the tone of the collection: "I am everywhere and the fear/ when it desires/ to grow, grows continental, drifting." What follows in part two is a long sequence of sonnets plumbing the poet's emotional devastation. Thirty-nine sonnets in total use sere metaphor, rhyming couplets and linked first and last lines to stretch out and interrogate the sense of loss when a relationship fails. The traditional poetic form proves useful--and gravely succinct--in locating the floor of the poet's grief. These are poems of profound introspection, paring down one's voice to a skeleton of perception.
After the austerity of the sonnet sequence, parts three and four open with more breadth and air. Not offering easy solace, these later entries nonetheless provide clarity and a more modern tone, in contrast to the sonnets. In "Iridescent Lake," the poet alights on "some form of yourself you love best because it survived the pain." The collection's last poem, "All I Ever Wanted," provides a mirror-like reflection of desire bereft of its object: "that all I ever wanted/ was to sit by a fire with someone/ who wanted me in measure the same to my wanting."
The sadness permeating If You Have to Go can be overwhelming, but by Ford's sheer insistence to map painful experience, and by no shortage of poetic skill, a sense of resilience emerges. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset