The Angel of History - Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry - Softcover

Carolyn Forché

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852243074 ISBN 13: 9781852243074

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, 1994

Synopsis

Poems deal with the concept of time, destiny, and the influence of the past

About this title

About the Author

In addition to her two earlier collections of poetry, Gathering the Tribes and The Country Between Us, Carolyn Forché has published most recently the anthology that she edited entitled Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

From Publishers Weekly

Though Forche's ( The Country Between Us ) previous books have been groundbreaking works of political and moral depth, this new volume may be the most remarkable. Ambitious and authentic, The Angel of History is an overarching book-length poem, composed in numbered sections, that invokes the horror of contemporary times in a mode reminiscent of Eliot's "The Waste Land." Much as Eliot's poem refracted WW I, the vacuity of culture and the fragmentation of modern life, Forche considers the Holocaust, Hiroshima and genocide in Latin America--the dismal past that predicates the chaotic present. Her vehicle is the Angel of History, who confronts human cruelty and misery but can do no more than record them, as explained by Walter Benjamin in an epigraph: "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But . . . the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward." Though the poetry is powerful, it is not always easily understandable; one must follow the Angel through serpentine lines, a disjointed and oblique nightmare whispered by an indeterminate narrator, and a splintered pastiche that borrows apocalyptic phrases from Elie Wiesel, Kafka, Canetti, Trakl, Char and Valery. But the journey ventured is well worth the occasional wrong turn: Forche has not only created poetry of consummate beauty, but has borne witness to the wounds of our collective history, fulfilling the conviction that "surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1852243074
• ISBN 13: 9781852243074
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96