{"id":11932,"date":"2021-04-08T07:49:09","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T06:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11932"},"modified":"2021-04-08T11:12:20","modified_gmt":"2021-04-08T10:12:20","slug":"carolyn-forche-in-the-lateness-of-the-world-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11932","title":{"rendered":"Carolyn Forch\u00e9 | In the Lateness of the World<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Forch<\/strong>\u00e9 |\u00a0In the Lateness of the World |\u00a0<\/em>Bloodaxe Books: \u00a310.99 <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"9781556595615-FC-700px-wide-resize-400x601\"<\/p>\n

The blurb to Carolyn Forch\u00e9\u2019s first full collection for seventeen years suggests that the poems are \u2018meditative\u2019. That\u2019s one way to describe them but it might not be the best.\u00a0 The fact that many of these poems are narratives either in the first person or in a clearly assumed persona, might suggest that \u2018meditation\u2019 is not quite what they are.\u00a0 Those first persons allied with Forch\u00e9\u2019s conspicuous use of simple tenses, present and past, makes these poems much more story oriented and driven than meditative.<\/p>\n

And the stories are driven because of their sense of witness.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9 has edited two anthologies of poetry of witness and so she knows what she is doing.\u00a0 In 2018, Forch\u00e9 reprinted her 1981 collection, The Country Between Us<\/em>, a collection in which she wrote powerfully and movingly of her experiences in Latin America at a time when that area was controlled by powerful right-wing forces, for whom killings and disappearances were the daily modus operandi<\/em>.\u00a0 In the Lateness of the World<\/em> is, in some ways, a continuance of that first book, in that many of the poems are, undoubtedly, \u2018poems of witness\u2019.\u00a0 The poems range from those wars in Latin America, through to the continuing effects of the Vietnam war, to poems set in Greece, the Russia of Ilya Kaminsky, and the Austria of Trakl.\u00a0 Each of these places has a story and that story has resonances of the past, and these resonances witness sometimes to vivid horrors, but more often to repression, where human lives are constrained and curtailed. If there is a meditative tone here, it is that the drive has that elegiac quality. Forch\u00e9\u2019s\u00a0great skill is to witness without drifting into hyperbolic elegy; to distance herself, instead, from the events she is witnessing \u00a0And that distance is never an absolute distance of removal, but it is, certainly, an artistic distance.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9\u2019s great need is to be able to write<\/u> about the things she sees without becoming so involved and overcome that she is not able to witness with all the skill she possesses.<\/p>\n

In part, that skill is to use long sentences that carry events and description and Forch\u00e9\u2019s reactions to those events.\u00a0 \u2018Letter from a City under Siege\u2019 begins with this;<\/p>\n

Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city,
\nreading the braille on its walls, walking beneath ghost chestnuts
\npast fires that turn the bullet-shattered windows bronze,
\nflaring an instant without warming the fallen houses
\nwhere you sleep without water or light, a biscuit tin between you,
\nor later in the caf\u00e9 ruins, you discuss all night the burnt literature
\nborrowed from a library where all the books met with despair.<\/p>\n

Here the participles, \u2018Turning\u2019, \u2018reading\u2019, \u2018walking\u2019, \u2018flaring\u2019, \u2018warming\u2019 create a suspended, continuous feeling into which the \u2018you\u2019 emerges with a factual urgency.\u00a0 Thus, Forch\u00e9 places the continuities of the \u2018I\u2019 narrator against the facts of the \u2018you\u2019 protagonist.\u00a0 The witness of the narrator is moving through the experience, whereas the \u2018you\u2019 is situated within it.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9\u2019s other great skill is to choose the adjectives carefully: wounded, fallen, bullet-shattered (more participles) and then the compound nouns \u2018ghost chestnuts\u2019, \u2018biscuit tin\u2019, \u2018caf\u00e9 ruins\u2019 so that a particular solidity is created around the context of nouns, \u2018city\u2019, \u2018braille\u2019, etc. All these participants are couched within a sinuous, fluent syntax that builds up to the final word \u2018despair\u2019.\u00a0 And the fluency means that this final, noun is earned; it is emphatic but not melodramatic.<\/p>\n

What that grammar all adds up to is establish that this is indeed a letter from that city under siege.\u00a0 The letter is the witness, made construction is that, made and constructed, but that even so, it is that construction which communicates the lives of those who live in the city.\u00a0 Some years ago, I heard testimonies from women who had lived through the siege of Sarajevo.\u00a0 One of these talked about swapping some cigarettes for a beautiful art book.\u00a0 That book and those pictures gave witness in their own way to the human culture transcending the moment.\u00a0 Although the books in Forch\u00e9\u2019s poem are burnt and the library despairing, the poem points to a way beyond that.<\/p>\n

The poem ends;
\nThe library burns on page sixty, as it burns in all the newspapers of the world,
\nand the clopping of horses\u2019 hooves isn\u2019t the sound of clopping hooves.
\nFrom here a dog finds his way through snow with a human bone.
\nAnd what else, what more? Even the clocks have run out of time.
\nBut, my good friend, the tunnel! There is still a tunnel for oranges.<\/p>\n

Of course, the tunnel with its oranges might only be available if you have the money or the right connections, preferably both.\u00a0 Human ingenuity finds a way to exploit even in the darkest hours.\u00a0 But even the irony offers a kind of hope, there might not be light at the end of the tunnel, but perhaps there are oranges. \u00a0And again, here, Forch\u00e9\u2019s skill is position that image of the oranges after these other larger, more rhetorical images of the siege reported in the world\u2019s newspapers, the way the senses suggest one thing whereas the truth is different, the innocent, Audenesque dog is, itself, party to the horror.\u00a0 The clocks have, with another Auden-like image, stopped.\u00a0 However, there might, just might, be oranges;\u00a0 something solid and possible.<\/p>\n

The \u2018I\/you\u2019 relationship runs through a number of these poems.\u00a0 Some of the poems are elegies to a dead \u2018you\u2019.\u00a0 In \u2018Elegy for an Unknown Poet\u2019, the dead writer returns to re-witness the world of the living.\u00a0 Here, the living appear both unreal and \u2018oblivious of what they are\u2019.\u00a0 The dead poet asks, frustratedly, \u2018what can be done?<\/em>\u2019 The living are caught in a stasis of their own making.\u00a0 And this stasis extends to the \u2018I\u2019 narrating, \u2018What is left us then but darkness?\u00a0 Oneself is always dark and near.\u2019 Perhaps the \u2018oneself\u2019 of the dead writing is also included in that, too.<\/p>\n

In the current world of, often but not always, brute, political masculinity, Forch\u00e9\u2019s witness is to that darker, nearer sense of selfhood;\u00a0 dark because it is complicated, problematic, deeper, and near because it is inescapable, an Eliotesque shadow that always walks beside us.\u00a0 These often very beautiful poems witness in a way which makes the reader part of that near, dark self, as Forch\u00e9 puts it in the very last line of the book, \u2018open then to the coming of what comes\u2019.<\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Forch\u00e9 |\u00a0In the Lateness of the World |\u00a0Bloodaxe Books: \u00a310.99 The blurb to Carolyn Forch\u00e9\u2019s first full collection for seventeen years suggests that the poems are \u2018meditative\u2019. 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