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Cargando... In the Lateness of the World: Poemspor Carolyn Forché
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I think Forché is a great poet, and I think elegies are powerful, and I appreciate the thoughtful writing of this collection... but it didn't work well for me. Any one selection in isolation, I'd like. After writing and deleting several thoughts on why, I'm going to leave it at maybe just timing and attention. This is the first poetry book I have read i which I understood many of the references in the book. Earlier in the pandemic I listened to [book:What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance|40712499], so immediately knew the poems that were referencing (and dedicated to) Leonel Gomez. I have read Ilya Kaminsky so understand more about the poems dedicated to him. There are several references to the city of the 900-day siege (St Petersburg). Poetry really is better when you have some background. Many of the poems in this book discuss family--especially Forché's immigrant grandmother Anna. There are poems discussing leaving home, leaving things, remembering places. It's all so GOOD. And in this book I found what may be my favorite poem ever. "A Room"--which discusses the items in a room, and how they came to be there, and their unknown/known provenance. So very good. I enjoyed most of the poems in this collection. My favorites included: (1) "The Lightkeeper" (because I've always been fascinated by lighthouses), (2) "The Crossing" (reminiscent of the voyages our ancestors made across the oceans), (3) "Travel Papers" (a Holocaust poem), (4) "Exile" (another one with historical focus), (5) "Fisherman" (very Jewish tone), and (6) "The Lost Suitcase" (which, of course, was filled with books). I also enjoyed seeing how many sources of stones she found in "Museum of Stones." While many of her poems featured long lines, a few seemed to offer shorter ones--a preferred style for me. The careful word selection creates beautiful portraits for readers. Second reading on 23 November 2020. I forgot I'd already read this. Similar reaction on second reading. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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"Over four decades, Carolyn Forch's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another. Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous 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. Forch envisions 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"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)811.54Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Forche spoke of a necessary space between the personal and political where witness poetry emerged – a space made necessary because of the too-narrow definitions that existed. That, in a time when young writers tended toward labels - political or confessional or romantic maybe - helped break the illusion that lives could be so compartmentalized.
The poems in her latest collection ‘In the Lateness of the World’ emerge out of this social realm but not without taking a hard look at Western minds that still want to keep lives wracked by war, and our unsavory histories, out of our mind’s eye. The poet shines a light migrations and crossings, and the harm and illusion of insulating ones' self whether in Asia, Central America, Detroit or on the Greek Isles where an overwhelming number of refugees pass. Her work alludes to earliest depictions of war in Western literature, a feeling of intergenerational trauma that overcomes our best efforts to shut it off.
In her poem 'Charmolypi,' this grief descends across generations, an “ache in the cage of breath” or a “light sound of wings brushing the walls” (57), being something brought down from Parnassus by Clio the Muse of History, a feeling that catches us unaware as if all the collective loss across generations were still present. The poem exists both as an acknowledgment of public grief but perhaps also as a rebuke for trying to distance ourselves.
There seem to be at least two certainties about the desire to wall ourselves off – its futility and our repeated efforts to do it.
In ‘Transport,’ Forche provides the reader with a catalog of ways to travel through this ancient land from rickshaws, to oxcarts, to taxis and small trucks. The speaker relates a set of instructions, saying that if the driver ‘struck/a man on foot we should run away before the car / is torched by the crowd and the driver killed.’ The idea of being a bystander collapses and the visions of burning cars invades the speaker’s dreams. Her poem is an answer to the idea of viewing the world from a mythical place of safety – which doesn’t exist. Our likelihood of doing harm diminishes as we stop trying to insulate ourselves – when we ‘go on foot’ (68).
Insulating creates a world surrounded by treachery, an area outside the light’s radius that is cause for fear. This is not the world of the poet whose proper work is to illuminate. Work that demands living like ‘the lensmaker who died / with his lungs full of glass’ or the ‘yew in blossom when the bees swarm’ becoming ‘their amber cathedral.’ The cost of this, like the case of the lensmaker, may be fatal but perhaps the reward ‘Nothing/to be afraid’ is greater. (13).
Forche, who has introduced so many newer readers to poets of witness such as Lorca and Mandelstam, has devoted much of her poetic life to this idea of illumination and implied the danger of writing from behind barriers. The images here put us in the scenes of atrocity, seeing many of them emerging from history, with Forche acting as our guide saying 'I will get you there' (6).
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