Katie Ford's Colosseum (Graywolf, 2008)

I've been awed by the work of a poet new to me, Katie Ford, whose second collection, Colosseum, I came across in New York. Here are some choice passages.

If it is as Socrates says,

that locusts were human

until they heard the song of the world

and, so captured, forgot

to eat and drink and died--

and if it's true the gods

took pity on the dead

enough to resurrect them

into ashen singing things--

then, so too, our songs

will have to be plagues.

last stanzas of "Beirut"

I threw tarps over a life

and never could they reach--

still hastily I gathered

tarps more rare by the hour

in the city of nothing to spare.

from "Rarely"

Disaster

eats what there is. It is

biblical: sit at the table of another

country, you must eat

what is set before you

They didn't know they were in another country

until they were left living.

from "Fish Market"

We were hardly vessels

what we took in could not be

and so we spat it out as dogs spit out

the wretched fish the only meat

the opening stanzas of "Vessel"

for when there is no storm

there is this stormed body

to keep alive in its solitary room

outside of which the snow is falling

one of us at a time.

the last lines of "Snow"

Look at the belief I can't live by, how it didn't follow

but was here before me like the fields of tall, planted cane

where anything can be hidden. I think this is

what we get when we ask to be saved:

a land where everything grows, and there are many killings.

the last lines of "What We Get"

All the films we saw there, their reels melting, the rows

where lovers went because they knew

or didn't know, it doesn't matter,

that watching the same story

could make them closer.

from "Coliseum Theater"

I listened to hymns and asked so much of them they quieted

like a body that withers when it feels itself

clung to.

*

Evidence being that which screams its moment--

one need not even look.

from "Raised Voice"

and when those who populate your life return

to their curtained rooms and lie down without you,

you are alone, you

are quarry.

from "Colosseum"

As for the tarpan it shall be for you.

A reckoning so slow you aren't even frightened.

the last stanza of "Earth"

The Book Depository has Colosseum for a discounted price with free worldwide shipping.