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Title: Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness by Carolyn Forche ISBN: 0-393-30976-2 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Poetry of hope and suffering
Comment: Please take the time to read a few of the sample poems. This book is a profound and moving account of suffering, loss, longing and hope that really hit home. THe poems will speak for themselves.
Hermann Hesse's "Poems" is also along this same line of thought and it is available in translation with the German on the facing page.
Rating: 5
Summary: moving accounts of personal experience and loss
Comment: This book has done so much to call us not to forget our own humanity. The impersonal power of war, the dehumanization of violent death at the hands of other humans- such tragedies as these call us to remember who we are as humans. It is one of the peculiarities of life that it is often at the brink of destruction that we see most clearly what our hearts have always spoken to us. In the violence of war and conflict, our thoughts often return to the simple things of life; the laughter of a child who lived next door, the smell of spring, the faces of old schoolmates.
This collection of poetry serves its title well. Only one poem spoken aptly to our heart calls us to our true selves, against forgetting.
You may also find the poems of Hermann Hesse of importance in this regard, along with the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.
Rating: 5
Summary: "I stand as witness ...
Comment: to the common lot, / survivor of that time, that place." Anna Akhmatova, one of the poets included in this anthology, wrote those words in the years before WWII as she struggled to survive, and express, life under Stalin.
Carolyn Forche has assembled this collection of poems, each of which expresses, in their own time and place, witness. This is not an idle witness, a standing by, a cool, detached observance. Forche writes in her introduction, "Modernity ...is marked by a superstitious worship of oppressive force and by a concomitant reliance on oblivion." The witness of these poets neither worships force nor accepts oblivion.
The effect of reading these poems, written in the face of war, genocide, oppression, despair and racism, even reading one or two at a time as I have been doing, raises the possibility that war, genocide, oppression, despair and racism are abject failures. Whatever their effects, they accomplish nothing. Resistance counts for everything. Pasternak, an included poet, described his novel in words which describe this volume: "besides the importance of described human lots and historical events there is an effort ... to portray the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless varients and versions."
Men and women from every continent give lie in their poems to the sad accusation that 'human dignity' and 'human rights' are 'western' or 'american' ideas imposed on the rest of the world. The oppressors are as likely to be 'western' and 'american' as anyone else. The witnesses "Against Forgetting" are everyone.
Because of witness, because of resistance, hope exists. As another poet (Muriel Rukeyser) suggests: The whole thing - waterfront, war, city, / sons, daughters, me - / Must be re-imagined, / Sun on the orange-red roof.
Great book. Absolutely great.
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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: Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi, Heinn Htet, Aung, Aung S. Suu Kyi ISBN: 0140264035 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Ammiel Alcalay ISBN: 087286345X Publisher: City Lights Books Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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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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