Description
Book SynopsisThe Angel of History bears witness to the moral disasters of our times: war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. The book is a meditation on memory – how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems are fragmented, discordant, reflecting the effects of such experience, but forming a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations we make to survive what is unsurvivable. It is divided into five sections dealing with the atrocities of war in France, Japan and Germany as well as Carolyn Forché's own experiences in Beirut and El Salvador. The title figure, the Angel of History – a figure imagined by Walter Benjamin – can record the miseries of humanity yet is unable either to prevent these miseries from happening or from suffering from the pain associated with them. Kevin Walker, in the Detroit Free Press, called the book 'a meditation on destruction, survival and memory'. Don Bogen, in The Nation, saw this as a logical development, since Forché’s work with her poetry of witness anthology Against Forgetting was 'instrumental in moving her poetry beyond the politics of personal encounter. The Angel of History is rather an extended poetic mediation on the broader contexts – historical, aesthetic, philosophical – which include [the 20th]…century’s atrocities,' wrote Bogen. And Steven Ratiner, reviewing the work for the Christian Science Monitor, called it one that 'addresses the terror and inhumanity that have become standard elements in the twentieth-century political landscape – and yet affirms as well the even greater reservoir of the human spirit'.
Trade Review"The "Angel of History" is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half century of atrocities that has yet been written in English."-- Calvin Bedient, "The Threepenny Review""The poignant "cri de couer" of this singular work most affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time."-- Robert Creeley"I don't think I have ever come across a poem of such length that is nevertheless so beautifully transparent and haunting."-- James Merrill"A dark, richly textured, complicated work...["The Angel of History"] is that great rarity, an altogether new thing."-- Liz Rosenberg, "Boston Globe""Poetry of consummate beauty...reminiscent of Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'"-- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review)
