The Country Between Us [Paperback]

Carolyn Forche (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 1982

The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where ForchÉ worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. ForchÉ's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Here is a poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called 'political' at the same time. This is a major new voice." -- Margaret Atwood

"Forché's subject, El Salvador is one that could have been easily sentimentalized or sensationalized by a lesser poet. And yet it is spoken of here with honesty and tenderness, even amid its tortures. For these poems are not 'made up' at all, but come from the complexity and more of human experience." -- Larry Levis

"Here's a poet who doing what I want to do, what I want to see all of us poets doing in this time without any close parallels or precedents in history: she is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political, lyrical and engaged. And she's doing it magnificently, with intelligence and musicality, with passion and precision." -- Denise Levertov

"I don not know another poet writing English today whose work has the force and drama of Carolyn Forché's. I do not know one whose work is more steadily absorbing." -- Irvin Ehrenpreis

"Latin America needs a poet to replace the man who represented in his writings the beauty, suffering, fears and dreams of this continent: Pablo Neruda, Carolyn Forché is that voice." -- Jacobo Timerman

About the Author

Carolyn ForchÉ is the author of Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award; The Country Between Us, which received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America; and The Angel of History, awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Centuly Poetry of Witness. Recently she was presented with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 31, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060909269
• ISBN-13: 978-0060909260
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #320,561 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forché sees evil & names it, August 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Country Between Us (Paperback)

Forché's poems of El Salvador in the late '70s/early '80s, in the first half of this book, could as well be written about Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya, or any of another dozen places that are sites of contemporary atrocity. And the U.S.: where all of us, so many of us good people, yes, good people, live on the uppermost levels of a structure of corruption and shame, which we fail, in our stubborn blindness, to recognize: "...I go mad, for example, / in the Safeway, at the many heads / of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples / and coffee, especially the coffee" ("Return," 19). Forché's purpose is not to give us the guilts, nor to turn us into evolutionaries, nor to congratulate herself as someone who is "aware," but to bring witness of objective conditions of evil in which we, as American citizens and consumers, participate.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars read and reread, March 28, 2001

By 

edward j. santella (Malden, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Country Between Us (Paperback)

Stunning, deep, beautiful and nerve wracking. I've carried this book with me for weeks now, rereading poems and trying to memorize parts of them. There aren't enough stars in the sky to rate this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Through a young woman's eyes: love and revolution, June 24, 2007

By 

J. A Carty "Jessie Carty" (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Country Between Us (Paperback)

I finished Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us which was simply amazing. I wish I had better words to describe her skill. Her poems are about reluctant revolutionary tendencies, interspersed with love/sex and seeking. There is probably a great deal I could say her about the strength of her work, but it just has to be read to be completely felt. If nothing else find the poem _The Colonel_ as an example of her ability to speak in a new way. One of my favorite books of poems this year.