Book Review: Conversation with Love by Tetyana Denford
Love is like being just the right amount of drunk,
when you decide whether setting fire to your manuscript
is a funny idea or a dangerous one-
but all you want to do is watch your burning words
float up to the moon, so you can decide which ones
you want to hold onto.
— Tetyana Denford, Conversations with Love
Written by Holly Ruskin
We talk a lot ABOUT love. There are songs, poems, t-shirts, postcards, films, art, books, even cakes can sometimes end up with something about love scrawled across the top. Yes, we talk about it. We think we know all there is to know about love. It has a shape and a colour; red hearts are perhaps one of the first things we all learn to recognize when we’re young. The feeling seems universally the same, and most of those poems, songs and films seem to tell us what we already know. They show us a picture drawn long ago and set in the stone of a popular culture that likes to sell us things.
As an editor, I’ve read many, many poems about love. The fist smack moment of that first rush of love from mother to child and then the slow, blooming of a permanently bruised heart that follows when she knows that this love is unending and consuming. I’ve read work by women who have written about loving themselves and what the journey to that love looks like. Poems about heartbreak, a love lost, or the feelings that survive long after the relationship has folded in on itself like origami.
Tetyana Denford’s book ‘conversation with love’ is the first collection of poems and prose I’ve read, that doesn’t tell me ABOUT love, but somehow shows me how it feels to sit WITH love. She opens the book by declaring that love is messy and that we are all born asking - or shouting - for it. An acknowledgement then that, yes, love is universal but also something that can’t be contained by the written word.
the morning after and four letter words that can seduce me are like lovers talking with each other as they discover their lustful love, uncovered after nights and days waking up together. In self-destruction/birth and for these reasons love seems to talk to itself about how much women must love themselves, applying it to their broken bodies like a balm. what love looks like is the picture it drew of itself and all the beautiful permutations we can find if we look beyond the heteronormative values thrust upon us by a society desperate to keep us caged. vows is the messy, fearful, adventurous and risky way we love when marriage and a union together forever is what we simultaneously seek and yet can’t make promises for. bedtime stories I tell my daughters when men shame them is love as it speaks gentle words to our children, our daughters, about the world they’re born into and all the ways they are safe in our love. In their love for themselves.
To choose a favourite poem in this collection is to somehow assume that when love talks, we can pick out the parts we want to hear. I don’t believe in a love like this, and neither does Tetyana. In this book is where I found, for the first time, a listening ear to love. A place where everything I feel, fear and think about love is present. Not presented, not finished. But just, present. We’re gently folded into a conversation that can become how we talk with ourselves. Not TO, or ABOUT, but simply…with.
I do love you don’t have to, though. It’s everything I want to say to my daughter, and the thing I wish I’d known about love all along. That it requires nothing more from any of us than to just be.
So I recommend buying conversation with love because I believe it’s a book of poems and prose that doesn’t seek to redefine love; instead, it is the starting point for learning how to listen in to love. Holding it up to our ear to hear the rushing sound of its power.
HOLLY RUSKIN has been a writer all her life, but started exploring the poetic form after the birth of her daughter in 2019. She graduated with a BA in English Literature & Film, going on to complete an MA in Film, specializing in feminism and the representation of women. She co-founded ‘blood moon poetry’, an inclusive and welcoming place for female poets to submit their work for publication. Holly lives in Bristol, UK.