On the cover of Katie Ford’s compelling debut volume of poetry, Deposition, we are confronted with a detail from Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling: the face of the Delphic sibyl. She appears young and frightened, glancing off into the margins as if pursued. Her mouth is parted as if to speak. Beneath the image, in white against the black background, is the word ‘deposition’, defined in Ford’s epigraph as the giving of testimony and the testimony itself, as dethroning and as laying aside, as ‘precipitation’ and as ‘sediment’. In another epigraph, this one from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we are told the dead ‘talk about their lives’ in voices that sound ‘like wings./Like leaves.’ Katie Ford’s poems are evocative testaments, perhaps from the sibyl herself, bearing urgent, authoritative, and necessary witness.
          What these poems witness is violence. And yet the violence is often unspecified, occurring off the page. What the poems do provide us with are the reactions to and the effects of violence: a brace to ‘hold her spine together’, a ‘wet body sobbing on linoleum’. The speakers in the poems internalize the violence–‘In me the sound of something repeatedly done to another thing’ ("When the Trees Are Gone")– and release it in fire, in ink, in words, upon the skin. The page, the body, the eye, the voice: all are contested spaces for which the voices must provide testimony.
          And there are numerous voices. They merge like the ‘dead voices’ of Beckett’s epigraph, blurring boundaries between individuals and between genders, creating a strange sense of anonymity within a work which seems on the surface to be deeply personal, as in "Someone Has to Tell Her There Is No Turning Back" in which an I, a woman ‘in the building across the street’, a recurring figure named Matthew, and his father, circle around each other within the lyric, sharing an emotional space but without any sense of actual connection or narrative structure. In the end, though connected by ‘ink’, ‘water’ and ‘cloth’, they remain separated. Part of the sense of anonymity may be due to the poems’ insistence on voice over vision. The title of the opening poem commands, "Put Your Hands Upon Your Eyes," and we are not allowed to restore our vision until the penultimate poem. In between we suffer and are remade, an idea that finds its greatest expression in the central section of the volume: a poetic sequence on the Stations of the Cross.
          In "The Stations of the Cross," a sequence of 14 poems which follow the service found in the Episcopal Book of Occasional Services, Ford attempts to understand the death of Jesus by recovering what vanishes

15
like the cross after it was done having a body on it and went unrecorded
16
thereafter.

Generally, the poems bear only an oblique resemblance to the Station; sometimes re-presenting the event in a modern setting, sometimes attempting historical reenactment, the poems attempt to make the scene tangible for us. At the same time, the speaker is a doubting Thomas who, while attempting to get closer to the ‘truth’ of the scene, understands that neither vision nor touch will bring her there; only belief will. But belief is sometimes difficult to distinguish from doubt:

Belief and doubt on the forms of faces.
          Ask the faces
which is which?

Ford, who received a master in divinity from Harvard University, approaches Christianity in this sequence in a manner one rarely sees in contemporary American poetry. She makes the subject modern and immediate, acknowledging the cynicism of the Twenty-First Century toward the answers of religion and yet wanting to have ‘something solved, ended, even darkly,’ to be the ‘someone/straightening something undone. A sweeping up of the left/ungathered’. This sequence accomplishes both an interrogation of the death of Jesus and an interrogation of Ford’s own (our own) religious scepticism.
          Formally, Ford proves herself to be a technical master of the line and the line break, of breath and sound within the poem. Surrounding "The Stations of the Cross" are a number of poems that call themselves ‘Last Breaths.’ These poems are written in couplets with long, unpunctuated lines, lines too long to sustain a breath, requiring the speaker/reader to move from speech to whisper to silence; the long lines deny the ‘last breath’ as long as possible, creating a tension and urgency. And within the construction of the lines we find an echo of the violence that pervades the collection. First, the lack of punctuation creates a kind of violence through the aural and visual collision of words (recalling Eisenstein’s sense that ‘montage is conflict’), and second, the heavy reliance upon half-meaning in the line breaks creates a kind of violence to the line, questioning the line’s autonomy in a vein similar to the volume’s questioning of the body’s autonomy: ‘As if the line of your body means you are not made of torn things onlookers’ ("Last Breath Blue Nude"). Formal violence is kept in check, however, by alternating the "Last Breath" poems with measured poems like "When the Trees Are Gone" and "A Historical Method" which slow down the testimony by dividing the lyrics into safe, ordered ideas, each one whole and reasonable, each one existing in its own space within the poem.
          My one complaint about Ford’s book is the lack of tonal variation. The book doesn’t stray. By the end, each poem becomes an aural assault, the violence in one poem echoing all past violence without a moment of emotional reprieve. In "A Woman Wipes the Face of Jesus" Ford acknowledges that ‘tenderness at times/must be written in’, but even here the tenderness is stricken from the poem as soon as it appears: ‘But in fact/they have hung him too high/to be touched.’ Yet the volume is filled with birds, and while sometimes the birds are ‘caught in fresh cement’ or ‘trapped in the chimney’, they also have the ability to ‘fly among the ruins’ or ‘walk on the frozen river’, providing us with a chance of lifting out of the violence of the poems. This may be the closest we come to hope or lightness in Katie Ford’s book, but she seems to be arguing that if one must suffer violence–historical, religious, physical, and emotional–one must at least pay witness, for, as Beckett’s play says of the dead, ‘To have lived is not enough for them./They have to talk about it.’