Customer Reviews

Colosseum: Poems

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Colosseum is a startling, rare book. The poems are authoritative and direct; they do not attempt to elude the reader, but instead confront the reader with an America that would have seemed impossible before Katrina. Katie Ford's affinities are with the great twentieth-century Eastern European and Russian poets, and there is a moral seriousness to her work that is all too uncommon in younger American poets. But it is her lyricism which carries the work, and makes Colosseum compulsive reading. This is a book to be returned to again and again.

Katie Ford's Colosseum seethes around her surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the devastation she experienced in the ruined city. Edgy, alert, and masterful in their movement across and down the page, these poems blur the lines between the external and internal, between the present and the ancient, faith and doubt, personal and communal. Rich in emotion, but refusing easy sentiment, Ford's new collection pushes the poetics forward from her award-winning first book, Deposition, and establishes her as one of America's most gifted and crucial younger poets.

Colosseum is a brief collection of free-verse poems by award-winning poet Katie Ford. Drawing upon the lessons of history embedded within historical ruins, contrasted with modern-day ruins such as the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (an experience the author encountered firsthand), Colosseum speaks of catastrophes throughout time, emphasizing that natural disasters deliver their wrath with equal fury to all people. A singularly compelling and thought-provoking poetry experience. "Earth": Wild horses folded into their last night. / One burrowed against the dead's descending heat / as three cantered from the threadbare wood. // You must leaving everything lit / by city light and Damascus light, anything fueled / except by your eyes on these animal bodies. // Species by species, light by light. // As for the tarpan it shall be for you. / A reckoning so slow you aren't even frightened.

The poems in this collection, even when standing at a two-thousand-year remove from their subject, are immediate, powerful responses to the ways by which we are both victim and aggressor vis-a-vis the natural world. Haunting without being maudlin, fiercely observant without losing subtlety, "Colosseum" is a testimony to the grandeur of which we are capable and the ruin that attends our progress. It is vital work that should be read by anyone interested in how threads of love and fear and awe bind us together in the midst of so much severance. In a word, stunning.