The angel of history

by Carolyn Forché

"Carolyn Forche is known as one of our most important contemporary poets. Her first book, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Younger Poets Award. Her second, The Country Between Us, won both the Lamont Poetry Award and an award from the Poetry Society of America. Although The Angel of History is a departure from her previous books, it contains echoes of both earlier volumes." "Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster - war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb - Forche's third collection of poems is a meditation on memory, specifically on how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented, discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable." "These are personal poems, poems startling in their honesty and humility, poems that bear witness rather than explain