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Title: Blue Hour : Poems by Carolyn Forche ISBN: 0-06-009912-7 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: a book of stunning brilliance from this poet of witness
Comment: Carolyn Forche is one of the most memorable poets of her generation; her peculiar avant-garde poetry is of endless relevance & massive creative vision. I've already written another review of this book, but I'll have to keep making more notes in reviews as I come to understand it more. I won't understand it all. We live in an age of such chaos, & in this book Carolyn Forche responds to it how a body grows bones with forms of stern order. With the forms of these poems it seems to me that she's positing that underneath any modern chaos is a ruling order, from the long end-stopped lines at the beginning of the book, like the end-stopped lines at the historical beginnings of western poetry, to the 40+ pg single poem with all its lines arranged alphabetically. In a short poem the notes at the end of the book reveal to be about the contaminated land about Chernobyl, in the context of the motions of the whole book, she makes me feel as though perhaps while one can only surrender to change, what is manifest not lasting, this is not an impetus into disorder & what will come is new sense.
Anyways, Carolyn Forche is a wild poet. This incredible book is a very exciting creative advance from her earlier work. Metasticizing cities -- she moves like a platoon.
Rating: 5
Summary: Forche Sets the Pace for her Generation Again
Comment: Forche's second book, THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US, elicited almost Pharisitical envy, a reaction that betrayed just how truncated and isolationist the aesthetics of American poetry had become. Her third book, ANGEL OF HISTORY is arguably THE WASTE LAND of the second half of the twentieth century. Never a mere rhetoritician of the political, Forche sets the pace for her generation of poets in her fourth book, demonstrating once again a fearless innovation of content and form. Carolyn Forche's fourth book, BLUE HOUR: POEMS, evokes that limnal state between the truth that is accessed in dreams and waking, when consciousness hovers in extreme receptivity between life and the death that is to come. Blue is the color of God in Orthodox iconography, the color, according to Maxim Gorky's grandmother, of her grandson's soul, and of the premonitory hour before dawn, with all of its connotations of enlightenment and illumination. It is in this new collection especially that one overhears the strains of a visionary's mystical apprehension, harvested from edge of extremity. In "On Earth," the forty-page abecederian hymn with its allusion to The Lord's Prayer ("Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"), Forche catalogs with photographic accuracy the life review of a soul neither able to go forward nor back, a consciousness suspended, as in a surgical theater, above the theater of human events, creating an elegiac commentary upon mankind's ability to create heaven on earth. Included in the volume are eight lyrics of startling beauty, as spectral and haunting as the body in x-rays, riddled with a light that either illuminates or casts a shadow upon our demise. I am reminded of those small and extremely heavy cones in Borges, made of a metal which does not exist in this world, images of divinity in certain religions in Tlon. These beautifully wrought shorter poems return the lyric to its specific gravity-epigrams of matter gleaned at the frontier of consciousness. In a culture where it would be easy for poetry to devolve into a merely anecdotal art, something on the order of California cuisine, Forche reminds us of Wallace Stevens' dictum: " Poetry is that which helps us live" or, as Adrianne Rich has said it: "Poetry is where the imagination's contraband physical and emotional imprintings are most concentrated, most portable." As such, we would do well to preserve in poetry that which is most essential to our humanity. In BLUE HOUR: POEMS, Forche restores poetry to its most sacred purpose and wholeness of being. For this alone, we should give thanks and applaud.
Rating: 2
Summary: a falling off?
Comment: I was one of the early big fans of Carolyn Forche, and I've waited greedily for each new book (which have been slow in coming!), but I have to say that this one left me disappointed. It seemed as though her hearly passion had turned into a manner, or a stance, or anyway something less felt than "thought up."
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Title: The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche ISBN: 0060925841 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche ISBN: 0060909269 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 30 April, 1982 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: What Narcissism Means to Me : Poems by Tony Hoagland ISBN: 1555973868 Publisher: Graywolf Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forche ISBN: 0300019858 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1976 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Columbarium (PHOENIX POETS) by Susan Stewart ISBN: 0226774430 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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