The Country Between Us

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.

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.

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.

The first book of contemporary poetry that I loved in its entirety. Forche's words describe the undescribable in ways that compel us to look at the unbelievable. A treasure.

Forche's poetry hits you like a rock. She deals in the poetry of the specific, and nothing escapes her. From her harrowing accounts of third-world revolution to the controlled sentiment of her look back on childhood friends, Forche takes the reader's hand and carries us with her, so much so that the walls that she sees are the walls that we see. For anyone needing their faith restored that American poetry is alive and well as we near the end of the 20th century, Forche's book will do that...and more.