Blood Lyrics: Poems

In her third collection, Ford (Colosseum) uses a child’s premature birth as an opportunity for reflection on human vulnerability, violence, and survival. Her finely wrought paeans and laments complicate the possibility of total joy or total despair when personal pain is not projected externally or the existence of others’ suffering is not apparent in our own daily lives: “I nightmared/ far from her// my body/ her empty tomb// all the while/ the earth laid down/ its brutal head/ it would not lament.” Ford also expresses incredulity regarding the invisibility of America’s current wars at home when she writes, “If we are at war, let the orchards show it.... If we wage it, let the war breach up/ into the light, let it unseam our garments... until we run to hide ourselves/ in alleys where at least rats and refuse/ and the sleeping poor show some partial ghost/ of what’s abroad.” Taken together, the poems become a meditation on the concurrence of abundance and peril, where sumptuous language expresses stark suffering and musical phrasing portrays a world of discord. Given these conditions, on the prospect “That it is even possible to stay alive,” Ford posits, “we should wake/ to each other and ransack/ this flushed skin of everything/ but praise.” [em](Nov.) [/em]