Description
Book SynopsisCarolyn 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 four 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. In the Lateness of the World is a dark book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché imagines a place where 'you could see everything at once… every moment you have lived or place you have been'. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and 'there is nothing that cannot be seen'. In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today. Her meditative poetry has a majestic sweep, with themes ranging from life on earth and human existence to history, war, genocide and the Holocaust. In the Lateness of the World is her first new collection in seventeen years, and follows three other collections published by Bloodaxe in Britain, The Country Between Us (1981/2018), The Angel of History (1994) and Blue Hour (2003). Jane Miller called Blue Hour ‘a masterwork for the 21st century’. 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.
Trade ReviewIt has been 17 years since Carolyn Forché published a book of poems, and In the Lateness of the World announces she is back. Coming fast on the heels of her memoir of last year this book is bursting with poems of migration, crossing, and looking back. It is as if the poet is standing, one foot in the river, wondering which way the next crossing will go. Drawing on her own travels and periods of reporting, on the world’s seemingly endless upheaval, these poems move beyond disquiet and creates the charged ethical field in which we all live, all the time, especially at that moment we move. -- John Freeman * Lit Hub *
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
Part of poetry’s tragic knowledge is that elegy is endless. Yet in its power to recall and to memorialise, elegy also effaces time and reinvests loss, the lost, with life. It is a form of overcoming, essential to our knowing of, and dwelling in, the present and to our becoming human… Carolyn Forché is one of the contemporary masters of that form, that act. -- Michael Palmer
Again Carolyn Forché hovers above the lacerated landscape of history filling the holes “between saying and said”. Blue Hour does not console but emboldens. The fear we share is never dodged. This singular voice is writ in bone, snow, coal, stone and sorrow. -- C.D. Wright
Table of Contents15 Museum of Stones 16 The Boatman 17 Water Crisis 18 Report from an Island 19 The Last Puppet 21 The Lightkeeper 22 The Crossing 23 Exile 24 Fisherman 25 For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo 26 The Lost Suitcase 28 Last Bridge 30 Elegy for an Unknown Poet 32 Letter to a City Under Siege 33 Travel Papers 38 The Refuge of Art 40 A Room 45 The Ghost of Heaven 48 Ashes to Guazapa 49 Hue: From a Notebook 50 Morning on the Island 51 A Bridge 52 The End of Something 53 Early Life 54 Tapestry 55 Visitation 56 In Time of War 57 Lost Poem 58 Charmolypi 59 Souffrance 60 Sanctuary 61 Uninhabited 62 Clouds 63 Passage 64 Light of Sleep 65 Theologos 67 Mourning 68 Transport 69 Early Confession 70 Toward the End 72 What Comes 75 Dedications and notes 76 Acknowledgements
