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mepresley's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
4.0
Post-apocalyptic poems, the focus is on loss and death and displacement, which matches my mood. Unsurprisingly for a poetry collection, the language & imagery are lovely, even haunting at times.
My favorite poems were “Exile,” “The Lost Suitcase,” and “Toward the End.”
“Exile”
My favorite poems were “Exile,” “The Lost Suitcase,” and “Toward the End.”
“Exile”
….So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,
city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys,
an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir
where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea.
If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when
you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed but rather as if
someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.
….
…You take the tram to a stop
where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks
with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand.
“The Lost Suitcase”
What, by means of notes, you hoped to become
a noun on paper, dark with nouns:
swallow darting through a basilica, your hands up
in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows
breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost
….
Dear one, who even in speaking is silent,
for years I have searched, usually while asleep
….
so I lay you to rest without your Psalter,
nor the monograph wherein you state your most
unequivocal and hard-won proposition:
that everything must happen but to whom doesn’t matter
“Toward the End”
…the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standing
in the aftermath
who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition,
and then, just like that—gone, and no one for hours
….
where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered
to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and
murk, you could see
everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place
you have been,
without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would
be one person again.
Some other favorite lines:
“Report from an Island”
This work is slow. A low hum of ordinary life drills into the mind
like the sound of insects devouring a roof. There is no hope for it.
There is only the sea and the yes, lights in the city of the dead,
and a plastic island that must from space appear to be a palace.
“The Last Puppet”
Souls have their own world. The corpse its bone cage.
Nothing but fire everywhere the fire finds air.
“Fisherman”
he is floating downstream, having caught nothing, cold and delirious
with winter thoughts, as they all are and were, and as for rescue,
no one will come. It is spring. The Neva, white and crisp as communion.
“A Letter to a City Under Siege”
The library burns on page sixty, as it burns in all the newspapers of the world,
and the clopping of horses’ hooves isn’t the sound of clopping horses.
From here a dog finds his way through the snow with a human bone.
And what else, what more? Even the clocks have run out of time.
“A Room”
…and books, chosen at random, as our moments are,
ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us
for an instant, here by chance and radiant with significance.
“The Ghost of Heaven”
So that is how we ascend!
In the clawed feet of fallen angels
to be assembled again
in the workrooms of clouds.
“A Bridge”
Behind us, a sea-cliff, landfall, ahead the wind,
tar-smoke, the sea, a carrick.
We sway on the bridge between them
above a great shattering. We have left
the verge, our certainty, and walk across
a chasm to the cries of cormorants, fulmars,
the wings of mute swans singing in flight.
“The End of Something”
This isn’t our last day, she says. Tomorrow is our last day.
As proof, she offers time singing in the darkness of time.
“Mourning”
the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there
….
For if the earth is a camp and the sea
an ossuary of souls, light your signal fires
wherever you find yourselves.
“What Comes”
the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left
neither for itself or another
a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been
thebeardedpoet's review against another edition
5.0
On first read, In the Lateness of the World is fantastic and really stirred me. I'll need to read it again before I try to put into words something about what makes it so great.
swamp_witch's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
kiramke's review against another edition
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.
thevicarslice's review against another edition
4.0
This is my first time reading Carolyn Forché and I am still in as bit of a daze. Ethereal, dreamy, haunting, politically charged in all the most subtle ways, and drilling down to singular experiences that ask to be reread again and again.
bgg616's review against another edition
5.0
Remarkable. Beautiful poetry. She is known for writing poetry of conscience. Many of these poems are dedicated to other poets, living and dead. These dedications help the reader locate the poem - where it is set, who it is about. The Ghost of Heaven and Ashes to Guazapaare dedicated to her great friend Leonel Gomez, 1930-2009 who talked her into going to El Salvador during their civil war in the 1970's. One of my favorites was Uninhabited , a poem about ghosts among us.