Colosseum by Katie Ford published by Grawolf Press 2008

In her second collection, Colosseum, Katie Ford writes with great beauty about ruin. The book in its entirety is a meditation on human fragility. The narrative of the poems moves through natural disasters both present and past and the devastation they can bring to human constructions. In this book, as with her first book Deposition, Ford is able to put together a collection of poems that coheres in a necessary way as a book, but is also full of striking individual poems. The book opens with a quote from H.D."there, as here, ruin opens / the tomb, the temple; enter." The direct command of that last clause is an apt opening to this text. It is both commanding and inviting. Then Ford begins with "Beirut," Ruin is a promise we make to each other: I am born the day Saigon falls and Lebanon takes to its own throat a club. The persona's birth in contrast to the damages of war sets up many of the conditions of the book: the global with the personal, the destroyed with the beautiful or the beginning of something new. The poem ends: then, so too, our songs will have to be plagues. The first section of the book, "Storm" focuses on hurricane Katrina. The poems are full of internal anxiety and reflection. Take "Earth" in its entirety: If you respect the dead and recall where they died by this time tomorrow there will be nowhere to walk. This continues and focuses on the fragility of the human body in the second section, "Vessel" and the concluding stanza of its opening poem, "The Shape of Us," When I stood in the American city, bells inside the walls wore on, not ringing for us but for their own death, that it might come now, and quickly. Something please tell me I'm wrong about impermanence, wrong there is no unbroken believable thing on this earth. The quote she uses by Leo Tolstoy at the beginning of the third section to the book, which is the title section, is dark, despairing, beautiful: "It was as though I had lived a little, wandered a little, and I came to the precipice, and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin." Ford has already taken us through ruin in many places and in many forms. The poems of the first two sections bring the reader to the precipice and the final section presents the promised ruin. But Ford refuses to allow her poems to simple reside in the ruin. It is as if she has determined to enact Wallace Steven's line from "Sunday Morning," where he says, "Death is the mother of all beauty." This is a bleak book, but it is also a desperately beautiful book. The book is topical, historical, and universal. I once heard Donald Hall say that a poem must have a counter movement within it if it is going to do anything interesting. These poems live in that state of counter movent. Ford displays the immeasurable loveliness of destruction easily sidestepping flag waving cliches that might have plagued a lesser writer.   — Jeremy Voigt

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and a chapbook, Storm. Individual poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and Poets & Writers. She has received awards and grants from the Academy of American Poets and the PEN American Center and is the poetry editor of the New Orleans Review. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons.