Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #183727 in Books
• Published on: 1982-04-30
• Released on: 1982-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Review
"Here is a poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called 'political' at the same time. This is a major new voice." -- Margaret Atwood

"Forché's subject, El Salvador is one that could have been easily sentimentalized or sensationalized by a lesser poet. And yet it is spoken of here with honesty and tenderness, even amid its tortures. For these poems are not 'made up' at all, but come from the complexity and more of human experience." -- Larry Levis

"Here's a poet who doing what I want to do, what I want to see all of us poets doing in this time without any close parallels or precedents in history: she is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political, lyrical and engaged. And she's doing it magnificently, with intelligence and musicality, with passion and precision." -- Denise Levertov

"I don not know another poet writing English today whose work has the force and drama of Carolyn Forché's. I do not know one whose work is more steadily absorbing." -- Irvin Ehrenpreis

"Latin America needs a poet to replace the man who represented in his writings the beauty, suffering, fears and dreams of this continent: Pablo Neruda, Carolyn Forché is that voice." -- Jacobo Timerman

About the Author

In addition to her two earlier collections of poetry, Gathering the Tribes and The Country Between Us, Carolyn Forché has published most recently the anthology that she edited entitled Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

Customer Reviews

Forché sees evil & names it
Forché's poems of El Salvador in the late '70s/early '80s, in the first half of this book, could as well be written about Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya, or any of another dozen places that are sites of contemporary atrocity. And the U.S.: where all of us, so many of us good people, yes, good people, live on the uppermost levels of a structure of corruption and shame, which we fail, in our stubborn blindness, to recognize: "...I go mad, for example, / in the Safeway, at the many heads / of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples / and coffee, especially the coffee" ("Return," 19). Forché's purpose is not to give us the guilts, nor to turn us into evolutionaries, nor to congratulate herself as someone who is "aware," but to bring witness of objective conditions of evil in which we, as American citizens and consumers, participate.

read and reread
Stunning, deep, beautiful and nerve wracking. I've carried this book with me for weeks now, rereading poems and trying to memorize parts of them. There aren't enough stars in the sky to rate this book.

Through a young woman's eyes: love and revolution
I finished Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us which was simply amazing. I wish I had better words to describe her skill. Her poems are about reluctant revolutionary tendencies, interspersed with love/sex and seeking. There is probably a great deal I could say her about the strength of her work, but it just has to be read to be completely felt. If nothing else find the poem _The Colonel_ as an example of her ability to speak in a new way. One of my favorite books of poems this year.