If We Knew How To We Would by Emma Barnes

The first thing you notice when you open If We Knew How To We Would is that every poem is a prose poem. A single justified paragraph, filling the page from side to side. One or two slip over the page onto a second side. One has mid-line breaks in the centre of the page. But in the main, everything is uniform. I feel this is unusual, to find a whole book of prose poetry, but I’m not sure; perhaps it is just something I have never encountered before.

There are three sections called In Our Hands, If We Knew How to We Would and The Body is Made of People and Truth. The book comes with a genuine health warning – it deals with themes of suicide and depression. You should avoid the middle section if you aren’t up to that content.

The collection begins with some high points and some wonderful use of metaphors to show the development of a relationship. This is taken from the poem I asked:

I did my homework in the way of the traditional overachiever. I held your hand. I put my palm against your chest. I asked in all the right ways with all the different forms of request. I could be trusted. I followed all the procedures and policies  that were laid out before me like a tapestry of compliance and then I followed them all…

We were created for you to tear me apart in a piece-by-piece fashion over a decade of love and arguments and never being quite right…

The poem called A series of gates uses a repeated phrase “I come to a gate. I get off the horse. I open the gate. I lead the horse through the gate. I close the gate. I get back on the horse.” It symbolises movement through a relationship. The journey from one phase to the next. It is repeated, exactly the same, three times. And then at the end, for the fourth repeat, it changes very subtly to something new. I love the simplicity and at the same time power of this tiny shift. The poem renders the evolution of a slow movement that we take through the course of a relationship.

In another poem called The core is one of the best pieces of writing about the declaration of love:

It is the day you tell me you have fallen in love with me in the most casual way I’ve ever heard it. In the moment my body went through the floor without me and journeyed down through the hot centre of the earth while the rest of me was suspended across the table from you as you ate, the cheese course.

A handful of pages after that declaration of love, over cheese, and we have reached the ending point in Choke:

We were in the final minute where no one makes sense and everyone feels something they didn’t think they’d feel in a space they didn’t know they’d feel it in.

The middle section of the book is indeed harrowing. I would sum it up using the first few lines of one of the poems, Albatross:

I have crashed into the ground like an albatross landing. My body is a bruise. My heart, capable of nothing. My breath sucked out through my mouth, my lungs, the space between my throat and my chest. It is a slap to the surface. It is a breach of trust. It is a gap in understanding…

The poems are raw and about loss and being left behind.

The final section of the book is called The Body is Made of People and Truth. It is a moving forward from the previous section, a resumption of life, but perhaps not yet a happy resumption. The questions and the doubts remain, and many of them are self-doubts. What we have is raw emotion, beautifully voiced and expressed, but hard to linger in because everything feels so raw and exposed. Things are temporary and often unhappy.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Auckland University Press