If You Have To Go

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.” (Aug.)