Otherwhere

The poignant cri de coeur of this singular work must affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time. Carolyn Forché makes a complex voice for all the mute victims of our destructive world as the killing goes on and the patterns of our lives continue our committed self-destruction. Hers is the heroism which still cares.

-- Robert Creeley * on Blue Hour *

In the Lateness of the World, her fifth book of poems after a hiatus of seventeen years, meditates on questions of witness, displacement and war. Through poems touching on the refugee crisis, genocide, nationalist strongmen and climate emergency, Forché paints a bleak but accurate picture of the West's supposed postwar prosperity. Throughout this new collection, she turns her inimical, at times prophetic, eye onto a still new and unstable century.

-- Sandeep Parmar * Poetry Book Society Bulletin *

Carolyn Forché has never undertaken less than the responsibilities of conscience, and now in The Angel of History she has written a poem that is suddenly important, like the Morning News, as habitual and callous in its events, but with this luminous and permanent difference: with a natural light that purifies and even exalts them by the iron fragilities of its compassion, a compassion that makes beauty political by its endurance. The book, with its refreshing leaves, mutters like a hill grove untouched by the devastations beneath it, restoring the craft of verse to its ancient sacral task of comfort. She reminds us, through piercing admonitions that more than just record the obscenities of civilisation, with an old faith in her craft that everything should be sung, and that the miracle in metre assembles limbs, ruins and fragments. The tone is that of a distant echo of a far train; the language, first searching, then gaspingly exact, has the distance of translation. This distance gives her poem the spiritual authenticity of a charred journal extracted from rubble, one written in secret by a poet whose name we do not know (that is, not only Carolyn Forché), but whose anonymity is certainly some woman’s. Tsvetaeva? Pauline Celan? Her mutterings are a voice that spoke, speaks, and will continues to haunt the future, after the camps, after the holocaust of Hiroshima, during Sarajevo and Somalia and Haiti, and during whatever fresh horror our century will repeat each morning, condemning them not with dialectic, but by the ironic serenity of beauty.

-- Derek Walcott on The Angel of His