The first poetry collection in almost two decades from Forché...is an undisputed literary event. Forché's poems—ever earnest, forcefully compassionate, often solemn—bear witness to the suffering of others...often looking beyond America's borders, while holding America to account for the global consequences of its actions ... Cast in long-lined couplets, free verse sequences, and jagged stanzas, Forché's best poems—and this new book contains some of them — speak as a kind of generalized conscience, 'someone standing in the aftermath,' heavy with guilt, but also lit by a strange hope that stems from an unshakable belief in human goodness and perseverance.
It is perhaps more accurate to call the book crisis poetry rather than climate poetry. Forché is more attuned to the suffering of the people living through climate crisis now, elsewhere on the globe, than the imagined, projected suffering of our own children and grandchildren who might live to see similar conditions right here ... This book is a stern kind of elegy—this is our fault, we let it get too late—with none of the confessional shame of The Shore. Her approach is much less personal; you have to look for her in these poems ... Though they’re not joy-driven, the poems aren’t joyless either. Here objects of nature have mystical power, an aura, and there is pleasure just in naming them precisely. Many poems contain these lists of objects, lists of labels that need no further explanation or embellishment ... But there is, at times, in place of survivor’s guilt or self-flagellation, a touch of self-righteousness ... (I read somewhere recently that language poetry is smug—but all poetry is smug, I thought.)
In order to understand what Forché is doing on the page, you have to look between the rows of type, and see what she leaves in the white space of your imagination. You have to rejigger, if not jettison entirely, your ideas or preconceptions about political writing and about what makes a poem. Forché’s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter, Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley. Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity, Forché’s work questions—when it does question—how to be or to become a thinking, caring, communicating adult ... In In the Lateness of the World, one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories. To read the book straight through is to see connections between her earlier work and her new poems because, by looking at the world, she has made a world, one in which her past is as present as her future ... as much as life takes, it gives, including the poet’s voice and its myriad possibilities, among them how to render silence.
Carolyn Forché concretes sentimental memories with clear natural and historical images within in her latest collection ... Forché is a master of capturing precise moments where poems create metaphors; all are gripped, clear, and exact ... In the Lateness of the World is a quick read at 77 pages. Readers of all ages will enjoy this collection and constantly return to favorite poems, as all demand multiple reads. Poems are not abstract or visual. Landscapes are clear. Histories are clear. All are familiar. Forché has created a compelling collection that teaches us how to harness sentiment within our natural and historical world.
Something mellifluous inheres in Forché’s straightforward narrative ... Forché is not engaging in mere poetic license, but offering us a poem that is aesthetically pleasing and at the same time vigorously interrogates the plight of humankind when ideologies come into armed conflict ... Forché’s unadorned accents are all the more efficacious for their straightforward simplicity ... bears witness to the courage and dignity of Carolyn Forché’s vision as well as to her preternatural gift for the language arts.
Anyone familiar with Forché’s work knows that her poetry of witness moves well beyond stunning imagery, having broad implications for the lives it hopes to remember and the readers it hopes to implore ... The pages are filled with imaginative language, but as one delves deeper into each poem, it becomes clear that the most striking lines are often just so because they exist simultaneously as impossible and true—not imagined at all but actualities that take on layered meaning in the context of the broader work and Forché’s activism ... There is in these poems a sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily unbound; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost. And yet the work is open. It is filled with entry points, porous, allowing room for readers to make their way in, to touch the cold gray walls and leave with a newfound urgency for one another; for what they cannot see or hear, except in that shared 'stone of the mind within us / carried from one silence to another.'
As the late great Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his Ars Poetica, poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, and under unbearable duress. It feels like Forche has done just that. She indicts herself as an 'American' in her memoir, but she is always looking outward. There's a global vision to her work: in other words, a good deal of travel and an awareness of the pervasive violence of the world. Forche speaks for the underdog, the disenfranchised and the lost ... Conflict is a leitmotif throughout Forche's oeuvre. That being said, some of my favourite poems in this collection are those in which she accompanies fellow poet Ilya Kaminsky on her travels ... In these troubled times, poetry like Carolyn Forche'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.
Forché’s ability to paint pictures with words enriches her deeply oneiric 'thought-scapes,' for lack of a better word, and is also evident in her more intimate poems ... a relatively short collection comprising only 77 poems, but I suspect that many readers will want to revisit these poems for their clarity and their insistence on our responsibility to the natural world, to the past and to each other.
Throughout her career, Forché has forged poems of witness, and she does so here with beauty and lyricism. The one misstep is an overabundance of list poems; Forché can bring to life objects better than nearly anyone, but we want the revelatory journey behind them. Yet, finally, this bounty of rich poetry is recommended for all collections.
In her first collection in 17 years, Forché...powerfully weaves poems of witness, a travelogue steeped in elegiac contemplation of life in Finland, Italy, Russia, and, most affectingly, Vietnam. These 41 poems vibrantly catalogue human artifacts and those of the natural world ... Throughout, the speakers are meditative but unflinching in the face of war’s aftermath and ecological crisis ... [a] genuinely moving consideration of 'ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us/ for an instant... radiant with significance,' communicating an urgent and affecting vision.
