This collection of poems by Carolyn Forche is a stunner, and one I'm sure I only scratched the surface of in reading it for the first time. Forche is writing about hard things here; the aftermath of war, including the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. She's also writing about the long, hard years postwar in places like the former Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There's so much happening in these poems--how do you recover from these atrocities, both as a person and as a community? How do you survive the memories? How long do you try and hold on to what's lost?
The epigraph is a quote from philosopher Walter Benjamin: "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."
That sets the tone for the book:
The past is not where you left it, Svetko.
It is a ruined city, spackled with grief,
The house, still yellow stucco with pear trees.
Empty swallow nests hang in the eaves
woven with bits of collar and sleeve.
There is a diary open to the words cannot remain here.
A beautiful, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching book that haunts me.
Recent Comments