Carolyn Forche's new anthology of poems about political violence receives a rave from Donna Seaman in Booklist. Forche visits UAlbany to make two free presentations this coming Thursday.
http://www.booklistonline.com/Poetry-of-Witness-The-Tradition-in-English-1500-2001-/pid=6421407
The 300 poems gathered so astutely in this authoritative and stirring
anthology were written by poets of the past whose lives were changed, even
destroyed, by war, oppression, imprisonment, torture, slavery, and exile. Poet
Forché (Blue Hour,
2003) has long been a champion and practitioner of poetry of conscience,
creating the genre-defining Against
Forgetting (1993). She now teams up with fellow English professor Wu to
excavate the roots of this essential tradition of poetry that confronts “evil
and its embodiments” in “appeals for a shared sense of humanity and collective
resistance.” The sheer enormity of this “living archive,” an artistic record of
five centuries of violence and suffering and protest and truth-telling,
illuminates humankind at its most horrific and most glorious. The selections are
blazing and haunting, poems of fierce precision, communal consciousness,
courage, and reverberating beauty, and Forché and Wu succinctly establish the
historical context for each poet’s work in glinting biographical essays. William
Blake, John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson are all seen from fresh
vantage points. Here, too, are antislavery poet Lydia Maria Child; Olaudah
Equiano, an enslaved Nigerian; Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay; WWII
veteran and dissident Karl Shapiro; and conscientious objector William
Stafford—“You walk on toward / September, the depot, the dark, the light, the
dark.”
More about Forche's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/forche_carolyn14.html
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