Carolyn Forché's Life and Career
Photo Source Carolyn Forché is known as a political poet, calling herself a "poet of witness" [ source Look Magazine. After her mother confiscated the journal and hid it, young Forche re-confiscated it, marking perhaps the beginning of a poetic vocation devoted to exposing tyranny, injustice, and bearing witness to the atrocities of the 20th century. Gathering the Tribes The Country Between Us In The Angel of History (1994), Forché turns away from first-person, lyric-narrative form in an effort to engage in a poetic meditation which examines, on a broader scale, the accumulation of a century of atrocities. Divided into five parts, the first three
sections follow the narrator as she floats like an angel through the ruins of Europeleading to death camps and across time to
more recent events such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The Angel of History functions as a meditation on the possibility of
history itselfevoking the speech of those who have otherwise been forgotten. Taking her title for the volume from Walter
The question of the possibility of poetry in a century of horrors circulates throughout the volume, and poets such as Brecht | |
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