Customer Reviews

The Angel of History

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This book demands all the mental stamina, literacy, and spiritual powers of endurance, that a reader can offer. The images and fragmented narratives resonate immediately, but there is enough to keep you re-reading, finding new connections, for years. The century's worst atrocities: Hiroshima, the Holocaust, World Wars, are right next to the century's highest intellectual achievements: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin. If you get the references, if you understand the history--or even if you don't (Forche is that good)--The Angel of History will be transformative reading.

This book is the work of a genius which demands to be read and reread time and again. A heir to the tradition of Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes, Carolyn Forche is able to create a work that once read will never be forgotten. This is not just the major book -- this is the very best. If the Lord Almighty lives in our prayers, this poetry is precisely his own, clear speech. It is a crime not to read this book.

This book is just so brilliant. The poems are all terseness, & their lyric integrity & elliptical masonry demand very close attention of the reader. This is avant-garde poetry written by the fists of genius.

In the interstices of the times we are living in. A book of poetry like this demanded to be born, and Carolyn Forche was elected parent. Like all great art: political, personal. The epitome of intimacy provides the koan of the distance of being human. This may be the defining poetic book of the nineties, and the end of the century. It is certainly one of those books, and by a poet who doesn't cease to fulfill her "vocation" as poet with great humanity and dignity.

Forche's ability to engage politics and history in her poems always impresses me. In particular, Angel of History represents a kind of sustained political argument against violence, and especially the violence created in war, that poetry is uniquely capable of making. What I mean by this is that it doesn't descend to grandstanding or the rhetoric you might hear in a Democratic candidate's stump speech. The poems, in their ambiguous identity of speaker, in the way their setting is unencumbered by either geography or chronology, in their assembly of the various theaters of war (post-Europe World War II to 1980s Middle East, for example) find a greater voice in the implicit than the explicit. Yes, this should be the natural distinction between literature and political rhetoric, where literature relies upon imprecise, yet unmistakable, references to actual historic events.

What I think distinguishes The Angel of History from Blue Hour, Forche's next book, is the reliance on concrete narrative for each of the sections. There is lyrical ambiguity, but I'm also aware of which time frame the speaker is in, and I can then use that to understand the book's larger argument, which is that any criticism of war can't be tied to chronology. Blue Hour has a similar aim in my mind, but the abecedarian form of the long title poem relies too much on incidental associations that would tie the sentences together. It makes for pleasurable poetry, but I think it loses the larger impact accomplished by The Angel of History.

Perhaps the Angel of History - witness to cruelty and misery, will join forces with the Angels of Poetry and, through a haunting mosaic of poetic beauty, will somehow discover an end to the horrible suffering and grief in our world.
Evocative of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Angel of Poetry is a plea to keep memory alive, to keep speaking for the dead. Forche has given us a purpose - as both readers and writers of poetry - a truly sacred task.

Bombastic, pretentious, and overblown. Also irrelevent.