Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is one of America’s most important contemporary poets – renowned as a ‘poet of witness’ – as well as an indefatigable human rights activist. Over five decades, she has crafted visionary work that has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, enquiries and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.

Her meditative poetry has a majestic sweep, with themes ranging from life on earth and human existence to history, war, genocide and the Holocaust. Her retrospective, Otherwhere, is published fifty years after her debut, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975. It includes selections from that book and from four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: The Country Between Us (1981/2019), The Angel of History (1994), Blue Hour (2003) and In the Lateness of the World (2021), and opens with If there is ink, a group of 16 new poems. According to Joyce Carol Oates (New York Times Book Review), Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine and Denise Levertov. Jane Miller called Blue Hour ‘a masterwork for the 21st century’.

Carolyn Forché's own selection from her books is prefaced with an introductory essay, Older Than Glass, Younger Than Music, in which she relates her life and times to her development as a poet and thinker, tracing the shifts in her poetry across her five collections. This concludes: 'What draws me to poetry is mystery, sensibility, and the hidden architecture of the poem, excavated in its making, and revealed in the tremor of disclosure. When I’m truly writing, the poem takes me as close as possible to the precipice, and allows me to see, however obliquely, what the other has seen. Only the poem knows the route, tacking between temporal latitudes until the armada of impeding thoughts have been blown off course. We live in a sea of ambient language, speech that surrounds and is also within us: why not set it in motion to a music of its own? At least to honour what we experienced, from ancient times to the present? For words are not rubble, but mosaic chips of salvific time and radiant naming, fragments of intelligence however fleeting, random signifiers that, taken together, become the shrine of a poem, a holy place.' 

‘A landmark retrospective spanning five collections across five decades, this impressive volume opens with an eloquent preface, Older Than Glass, Younger Than Music, which delineates Forché’s poetics. What is remarkable about her work is a visionary ability to merge poems of personal intimacy with geopolitical realities, distinguishing her as a “poet of witness”. War, displacement and genocide are juxtaposed with elegiac meditations’ – Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian (Best recent poetry round-up)

Praise for Carolyn Forché's poetry:

'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

'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

'The American activist and poet Carolyn Forché's In the Lateness of the World has a global scope and a revelatory quality, as if she is writing from the end times... Forché’s style is meditative and mystical: this is a poet who lingers and puts pressure on language.' – Tom Williams, Literary Review

'In these troubled times, poetry like Carolyn Forché's can lend insight, but it can also salve and elegise the present moment. Auden once wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, but in Forche's work, her life-long commitment to poetry and the poetic utterance, we see how poetry can transform. Both What You Have Heard Is True and In the Lateness of the World are essential reading not only for anyone interested in poetry, but in the world we live in.' – Dr Paul Perry, Sunday Independent  [reviewing Carolyn Forché's memoir together with her new collection In the Lateness of the World]

'The title of Carolyn Forché’s new collection seems prophetic. Seventeen years in the making, In the Lateness of the World is an act of witness, going repeatedly into the darkness of death and loss. It’s no elegy for a pandemic, but it is a series of portraits of modern history and war: of manmade losses. There are massacres, refugees, and individuals who disappear alone into the turmoil of world events. Yet these fierce elegies are also beautiful...Forché’s almost incantatory way with image produces a strange tone, spell-bound but also emotionally charged, in which time and place shift and blur – because we’re all implicated.' – Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

'Carolyn  Forché's In the Lateness of the World seeks to give voice to the speechless poor in a century of endless  war and environmental disaster... It's a beautifully apocalyptic collection about exile, dangerous crossings, burned bridges and lost cities.' – Andy Croft, Morning Star

'The vision and range of her poems is vast - encompassing history, geography and philosophy – but it’s her language and lyrical skill I love, at times majestic, at times surprising but nearly always sublime... I do think Carolyn is one of the greatest living writers in English.' – Hugh McMillan, Poems from the Backroom

‘Forché’s great skill is to witness without drifting into hyperbolic elegy; to distance herself, instead, from the events she is witnessing…  Forché’s great need is to be able to write about the things she sees without becoming so involved and overcome that she is not able to witness with all the skill she possesses.’ – Ian Pople, The Manchester Review  on In the Lateness of the World

'...Carolyn Forché's In the Lateness of the World is an uncompromising, richly-textured and elegiac narrative on migration, crossings and social justice... through her dexterous use of form and poetic language, these haunting poems remind us of art as a unifying and healing force during and despite political change or crisis.' – Jennifer Wong, PN Review

Carolyn Forché reading at Newcastle Poetry Festival 

Carolyn Forché reads poems from In the Lateness of the World, plus some new work, at the 2024 Newcastle Poetry Festival.

Carolyn Forché reads from The Country Between Us and The Angel of History

Carolyn Forché reads two poems from The Country Between Us, ‘The Visitor’ and ‘The Colonel’, followed by extracts from The Angel of History. Neil Astley filmed her reading a selection of her poems in London in July 2014.

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