Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #892836 in Books
• Published on: 1976-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 58 pages

Customer Reviews

Poetry of Displacement and Replacement
Forche's winning collection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets is filled with language (sometimes emotive, sometimes deliberately stark) about the displacement of culture, love, and harmony coupled with a replacement of belief, identity, and beauty. The poems in the collection show Forche's skill in the early (not beginning) stages of her craft. Mourning and celebration of identity in "The Morning Baking" and "What It Cost" link Forche's history with the burden of passing on those oral records. "Burning the Tomato Worms," "This Is Their Fault," and "Taking Off My Clothes" demonstrate a confidence in sexuality also exhibited in such poets as Marge Piercy and Adrienne Rich. Even Forche's early lyricism in "Calling Down the Moose" and "Song Coming Toward Us" deserve attention. And no one can praise "Kalaloch" better than Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz in the introduction to Forche's manuscript: "In its boldness and innocence and tender, sensuous delight it may very well prove to be the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era."

Forché's first book lyrical but not self-involved
Forché's first book, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, has an implicit politicism, with poems about the political intrusions (Terrence Des Pres' term) that led to her grandparents' disclocations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, and her as-a-matter-of-course discovery of love between women in "Kalaloch." Most poems here tend towards the personal lyric, decidedly unsolipsistic. The poet Stanley Kunitz, judge of that year's Yale Younger Series prize, introduces the collection.

Beautiful, sensuous poetry
There is a richness to the poems in this first volume of poems written by Carolyn Forche - words lovingly woven into images and sounds that feel good in your mouth if read aloud. You simply want to taste them, bite into them, savouring their flavour and swallow, feeling them become you. Themes of ethnicity, of friends,lovers, family have underlying themes of displacement and the gathering together of the tribes. It is an important title - Gathering the Tribes - since it has a oneness without surrendering the individuality of one's ethnic group nor self. Very highly recommended.