Bøker av Carolyn Forche

Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. "Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing," note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. "It includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West."These poems offer a startling look at the way language both affects and reflects the realities of war and extremity. This anthology is sure to become the classic text marking not only one of the darkest periods in Ukrainian history, but also a significant moment in the universal struggle for democracy and human rights.

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

A young girl's adventure teaches her that she is God's creation!

Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, travelling around a country erupting into civil war. Briefly available from Jonathan Cape in the 1980s, it was reissued by Bloodaxe to coincide with the publication of Forche's long awaited memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True.

Carolyn Forche is one of America's most important contemporary poets. Her later collections are visionary works drawing on work written over many years. In the Lateness of the World is a dark book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death.