The Poetry of Carolyn Forché
The poetry of Carolyn Forché is characterized by its powerful themes of witness and confrontation, encouraging readers to transcend personal and national boundaries. Forché's debut collection, *Gathering the Tribes*, explores her family heritage, particularly her immigrant roots and experiences with Native American communities, while also reflecting on her own sexual awakening. Her subsequent work, *The Country Between Us*, further established her as a significant voice in contemporary poetry, blending personal narratives with political themes, particularly through her poems about her experiences in El Salvador as a human rights activist. While some critics have labeled her work as overly political, Forché's poetry is more about the universal experiences of human loss and the complexities of personal and collective memory. Her most ambitious piece, *The Angel of History*, departs from her earlier lyrical style, embracing a fragmented and multi-voiced narrative that addresses historical moral failures and their implications for the present. Additionally, her anthology, *Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness*, underscores the importance of memory and engagement in combating forgetfulness in the face of historical tragedy. Overall, Forché's poetry invites readers to reflect on both personal and societal struggles, emphasizing the role of empathy and redemption.
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Subject Terms
The Poetry of Carolyn Forché
First published:Gathering the Tribes, 1976; The Country Between Us, 1981; Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, 1993 (editor); The Angel of History, 1994
The Work
Carolyn Forché’s poetry of witness and confrontation encourages readers to cross national, geographical, and personal boundaries, boundaries that she believes serve to isolate and brutalize the less powerful. Her first volume, Gathering the Tribes, was published in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets. These poems are about three main topics: her immigrant relatives, especially Anna, her Slavic paternal grandmother; her encounters with Native Americans in the southwestern United States; and the sexual initiation of the poet, whose search for physical fulfillment indicates her desire to escape the exile status that defines immigrants and Native Americans.
Forché’s next volume, The Country Between Us, was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and solidified her reputation as a writer. Despite the critical acclaim for the volume and its status as a best-seller—at least by poetry standards—some critics complained that her work was too political, even sensational. Their criticism focused almost exclusively on the eight poems titled “In Salvador, 1978-80,” which deal with her experiences as a human rights activist in that country.
Yet the other two sections of the volume, “Reunion” and “Ourselves or Nothing” are set in such diverse places as the midwestern United States, Mallorca, and eastern Europe. What unites the poems in The Country Between Us is not geography or a specific political ideology but simply a sensitivity to the many faces of human loss. The poems document the human proclivity to hurt or maim, on a personal and a political level. Forché continues to assert, however, that the human touch is redemptive, if only temporarily.
The Angel of History is Forché’s most complex work to date. Abandoning what she describes as “The first person, free-verse, lyric narrative poem of my earlier years,” The Angel of History is, as she says, “polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration.” The five sections of this long poem, with all their different voices and locales, speak to the power of memory and confrontation. Forché suggests that by reexamining the moral failures that led to the death camps in Nazi Germany, as well as to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, other mass assaults on the human body and spirit can be prevented. Similarly, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness is an anthology, edited by Forché, of protest poetry that documents the curative powers of memory and engagement.
Bibliography
Diggory, Terrence. “Witness and Seers.” Salmagundi 61 (Fall, 1983): 112-124.
Doubiago, Sharon. “Towards an American Criticism: A Reading of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us.” The American Poetry Review 12, no. 1 (January-February, 1983): 35-39.
Greer, Michael. “Politicizing the Modern: Carolyn Forché in El Salvador and America.” The Centennial Review 30, no. 2 (Spring, 1986): 160-180.
Walker, Kevin. “Inspired by War.” Detroit Free Press (May 22, 1994): 8G.