Review: The autobiographical poetry of 'Notes on Heartbreak' by Annie Lord

In Notes on Heartbreak, Annie Lord delicately captures and commits to paper the acute feelings of love and loss.

It is an autobiographical and poetic account of a five-year relationship coming to an end, and the painful and eventually satisfied aftermath. Her tender, acute, yet powerful metaphors interlace her accounts and ache with the familiarity of feelings I didn't know how to describe well enough to notice them.

She begins the book by confessing the universal longing to tell the person just broken up with about the breakup. She imagines visiting him and telling him about her ex and the relationship and its ending and how he would know exactly what to say. But she can’t because he is the person in the ex, and she can’t speak to him. These universal feelings described in such personal detail pepper the book, making it deeply profound and beautiful.

To express emotions to their fullest, she pulls on her obviously extensive knowledge of literature, poetry, and philosophy. She uses the quotes and ponderings of others where they have perfected a metaphor or a phrase and it is futile to try to add or develop a point that has been expressed so perfectly.

‘On the death of his wife, C.S Lewis found himself frustrated at the process by which his image of his wife became increasingly inaccurate.’ She understands and quotes him. ‘Slowly quietly like snowflakes- the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night- little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on my image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.’

She describes how seeing him after a long time, she was reminded of ‘the things that make him someone I remember,’ and how in seeing him, these ‘snowflakes that had blurred the image’ she had of him in her mind ‘melted’, making him clear and whole again.

But her own metaphors are equally as heart-wrenchingly accurate. ‘The conversation carries on like this for a while’ she writes about meeting with her ex to talk after a while, ‘Stiff, as though we never really knew each other. “It’s me” I want to say.

“It’s Annie,” like when families kneel at the beds of their relatives with dementia. “Can you hear me?”’

The feeling of physical closeness with an invisible distance of time between past lovers is perfectly conveyed in these few words and their desperation. All her accounts of full of perfection like this;

The post-break-up sex that impossibly affords the sparkly newness of a stranger with the familiarity and comfort of old love.

The way that eventually, things become sensations and feelings rather than problems.

How, even after moving house, ‘the life we built in this place will always exist somewhere, turning corners in dreams to see Joe in the kitchen smoking… for us, the house will stay how it was when we moved there.’

The feeling of youth of sitting on the kitchen worktop that comes from having your feet off the ground.

In reading, you are afforded pre-loved advice from her amazing friends, mother, taxi drivers, and dates. You are given a part in conversations you were never there for but would’ve been helped if you were. In her retelling, Lord also compounds these with her own advice and reflections, aimed at herself and also to you.

‘I used to find it frustrating when it comes to the universe that you can’t change what’s already happened. But right now, this fact starts to feel reassuring as it shows there is no point endlessly contemplating tactics for sorting it all out because you couldn’t fix it even if you tried.’

The book is comforting, and melancholy and the reflections and metaphors will come to me often.