Scan barcode
A review by seebrandyread
The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
Carolyn Forché describes her own collection, The Country Between Us, as "poetry of witness." The first section of the book is dedicated to her time in El Salvador during the country's 12-year civil war as a journalist and human rights advocate, and the other two combine experiences from her other travels and the people she encounters along the way.
As the title suggests, these poems are preoccupied by space and different forms of separation. Space can be vast like a continent or country or as narrow as a jail cell or the human body. No space is too large or too small to contain tragedy or grace. Spaces hold the potential to contain or exclude, to be vessels of safety or entrapment.
The first section includes political figures and other people and activists Forché met or knew of in El Salvador. The second section follows her travels to other parts of the world and in America and the people she meets and observes there. She "witnesses" these lives of others, lives big and small, past and present. Some of them may have no other memorial than Forché's words.
Time is another version of space in these poems, another form of joining or separating. Time passing can wipe away memory or deepen a sense of myth or legend. This collection was published in 1981, now 40 years ago, and some of its poems were written even earlier or are at least dated in the 60s. Forché calls equally on the past and future, knowing that how she feels about the past is the same as how future her will feel about the present, leaving a tone of repetition and inevitability in her poems.
Beauty and horror appear side by side in Forché's portrayals of war, genocide, and other ubiquitous atrocities. While I don't think I could characterize the book as hopeful, it at least points toward the necessity for fighting--for survival, for art, for brief but sustaining moments of connection.
As the title suggests, these poems are preoccupied by space and different forms of separation. Space can be vast like a continent or country or as narrow as a jail cell or the human body. No space is too large or too small to contain tragedy or grace. Spaces hold the potential to contain or exclude, to be vessels of safety or entrapment.
The first section includes political figures and other people and activists Forché met or knew of in El Salvador. The second section follows her travels to other parts of the world and in America and the people she meets and observes there. She "witnesses" these lives of others, lives big and small, past and present. Some of them may have no other memorial than Forché's words.
Time is another version of space in these poems, another form of joining or separating. Time passing can wipe away memory or deepen a sense of myth or legend. This collection was published in 1981, now 40 years ago, and some of its poems were written even earlier or are at least dated in the 60s. Forché calls equally on the past and future, knowing that how she feels about the past is the same as how future her will feel about the present, leaving a tone of repetition and inevitability in her poems.
Beauty and horror appear side by side in Forché's portrayals of war, genocide, and other ubiquitous atrocities. While I don't think I could characterize the book as hopeful, it at least points toward the necessity for fighting--for survival, for art, for brief but sustaining moments of connection.