![]() You wouldĪgainst this urge toward wholeness, a pervasive sense of loss and uncertainty permeates the poems in this collection. Without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. ![]() To your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze andĮverything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place Where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered Like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air Passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standingīut reaches at the end, a moment of illumination where In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen In the poem “Toward the End,” she begins in the aftermath: Working in many modes (elegy, lament, lists, landscapes, prose pieces and various stanza patterns), Forché creates a sense of end times, of a speaker sifting through various bewildering events. ![]() This new collection continues Forché’s journey through histories both personal and political. Over the past four decades, Forché’s work has grown to exemplify what she describes as “poetry of witness.” In her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Forché argued against “personal” or “political” aims for poems, striving instead to present poets who persisted in writing under the most extreme social duress in conditions of war, exile and imprisonment. In the Lateness of the World is Carolyn Forché’s first collection of poems in seventeen years. ![]()
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