The Angel of History - Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry

by Carolyn Forché

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

Genres: Poetry, War, Literature, Read For School, Nonfiction, History, The United States Of America

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1950. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems with Munir Akash (2003), Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.

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Reviews

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of poetry, fragmented, evocative, powerful, imsges I find impossible to forget. Dark, so dark, a compilation of thoughts on the disasters, horrific events of the twentieth century. The Holocaust, the atomc bomb, the body dumps in El Salvador, Beruit, so many. Memory, how it survives the unimaginable, allowing the living to continue on, to survive what is unsurvivable.

A white dress in a closet, a hand carrying white tulips, a child's Bible, holding roses in a cemetery, stained glass windows, glimpses, haunting images.

"This is what we have taken the ordinary world to mean:
bootprints in clay,
the persistence of tracked field.

What was here before imperfectly erased
and memory a reliquary in a wall of silence.

"You loved the shabiness of the world: countries invaded, cities bombed, houses whose roofs have
fallen in,
women who have lost their men, orphans, amputees, the war wounded.
What you did not love any longer was a world that has lost its soul."

Not a happy little Christmas Eve read, but a good reminder of how far we have not come. How little those in power, in whatever country, have learned from history. Also a good reminder to be grateful for what we do have.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carolyn Forché was a poet I never got around to reading. She was always in my backlog. Why? Then I slowed down a bit and she produced the superb memoir What You Have Heard Is True. Now all her work lies before me like a gift. I’m so grateful. It’s remarkable.

The poems touch on war-wracked landscapes—East Berlin, Prague, El Salvador, Hiroshima. The living, such as they are, are adrift and suffering in the wake of atomic bombings, totalitarian repression, genocide. I’m a little reminded of the post-war social destitution described in Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia. But Figes, harrowing as it is, is prose. Here we have poems built from cinders and ash, bloated corpses, machine-gunned facades, starved populations, black dendritic trees.

“Doves, or rather their wings, heard above the roof and the linens floating / Above a comic wedding in which corpses exchange vows. A grand funeral celebration / Everyone has died at once / Walking home always, always on this same blue road, cold through the black-and-white trees / Unless the film were reversed, she wouldn’t reach the house / As she doesn’t in her memory, or in her dream / Often she hears him calling out, half her name, his own, behind her in a room until she / turns / Standing forever, where often she hears him calling out” (from “The Recording Angel,” p. 55)

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour / the bottle in your coat half vodka half winter light. / To what and to whom does one say yes? / If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him? (from “Elegy,” p. 69)

We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness. / But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close. / As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden. / And in the silence surrounding us what happened to us / / it is the bell to awaken God that we heard ringing. (from “The Garden Shukkei-en,” p. 71)

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meme é cultura, pelo menos o tipo de meme de que gosto, mas nem sempre ele é fiel à realidade. Essa semana mesmo viralizou um meme nas páginas em inglês de um suposto trecho de carta homoerotico escrito pela Emily Dickinson. Acontece que não foi escrito por ela e sim por Carolyn Forché num dos poemas que constam no livro The Angel of History de 1995.
Um belo livro aliás, é um apanhado lírico do horror do século XX, mas como americana Forché meio que esquece que boa parte dos horrores do século XX foram causados pelos EUA, então é uma lírica meio enviesada.

[christopher leibow · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Angel of History was remarkable and astonishing. It’s fragmentary structure is something that I have attempted since ready some essay’s by Heather McHugh and I think this is a wonderful example of tying fragmentary pieces of history into a loose narrative that peeks out enough to catch a glimpse and be carried along. The fragmentary form is an appropriate vehicle considering the topic of history itself and the violent history of the twentieth century. The opening epigraph from Water Benjamin is perfect. By the second poem in the collection I am totally captivated. The lines, “ Autumns the fields were deliberately burned by fire so harmless children ran through it/ making a sort of game.” And then the this line in the third poem took my breath way, “ Within the house, the silence of God. Forty-four bedrolls, forty four metal cups/And the silence of God is God.” This line born on the back of a quote from Elie Weisel’s poem set the stage of the journey that the poet was taking the reader on.

Throughout the poems. Forche´ act as witness to inhumanity, to the detris of suffering, but like the angel of history, there is nothing she can do, there is no redemption, except that of witnessing the suffering of the world and that the suffering will not be forgotten. This is a beautiful book, a beautifully honest collection, that finds beauty in suffering. Maybe that’s redemption enough. This collection is one that I will return to time and time again.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book succeeds at the polyphonic, fragmented lyric where so many books fail. Why? Perhaps, this is too simplistic, but I think it's because she maintains the integrity of each line. The lines are clear, haunting, and epigrammatic. The fragments arise between sections and "stanzas" and within perspectives and times not within the lines and phrases themselves. This integrity is the foundation for me and gives the "pile of debris" its intensity. Some such lines I will carry around for many years to come:

And God's name [i] a boneless string of vowels.


Please, when you write, describe again how I looked in the white dress that improbable
morning
when my random life was caught in a net of purpose.


...the little ones in graves the size of pillows.


and the section:

XXVII

If you ask them anything they go on telling you the same thing forever.
Not what happened, but what may happen.
Death understood as death.
[i] The world in its worlding.
Our hope put into question.
Figures dead and alive
whispering not truth but a need for truth when one word is many things.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly great book. It is interesting to compare this to another book I recently read, C. D. Wright's Rising, Falling, Hovering. Forche creates this argument against war by directing her anger at an indisputably despicable war: World War II. But what I admire so much is that the poems seem to exist outside of time, as in this speaker couldn't possibly be alive at all the times she implies she is. Yet even in this vague chronology what is obvious is the impact war has on history and on people trying to live through history. People are ruined. And wars continue to happen.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the night-vaulted corridors of the Hôtel-Dieu it is winter.
If a city, ruin, if an animal, hunger.
If a grave, anonymous.
If a century, this.

Are the present hundred years a long time? But first see whether a hundred years can be present.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

From ELEGY:

And so we revolt from silence with a bit of speaking.


I love this book. I love Forche's voice in general, its quiet refusal to remain quiet.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking. / The page is a charred field where the dead would have written / "We went on." And it was like living through something again one could not live through again. / The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house / with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings / where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field, / And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell" (68).

How was this gem only $1.50 at McKay's?! Definitely one of the most haunting, fascinating books of poetry I've ever read, with a remarkable clarity of images and significant historical grounding.

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Forche through her translations of dissident Claribel Alegria. She is always difficult, probing and challenging. I like to dig and her poetry requires patience and a love of the convoluted linkages in the history of emotional reality and physical reality.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written meditation on what remains after war and loss, remembrance and what's forgotten. It can be difficult to read at times, dealing with grief and the horrific, but it's beautiful and transcendant. Highly recommended.

[David Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books of poetry ever.

[Victor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly my favorite book of poetry.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep and big. Wonderful language...

[Joanna Eleftheriou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, haunting, important.

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative and powerful.

[LYS. · Rating 4 out of 5]

actually 4.25 stars!

the imagery of it all…

[Stevie Faye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fantastic. Haunting and delicately pieced together, I’m glad I read this now given the genocide happening in Palestine; there are a lot of parallels here

[Carson Gallant · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Don’t say I was there, always say I was never there”
The Recording Angel III

[H]

If you want, I’ll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough.

i wish i was taking a class where someone was teaching this book to me. i want to understand it better than i do. what i do understand—my god

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Knecht, Magister Ludi, in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, says,
“Well now, every experience has its element of magic. . . .
I discovered Schubert's spring song, “Die linden Lüfte sind erwacht,” and the first chords of the piano accompaniment assailed me like something already familiar. Those chords had exactly the same fragrance as the sap of the young elder, just as bittersweet, just as strong and compressed, just as full of the forthcoming spring. From that time on the association of earliest spring, fragrance of elder, Schubert chords has been fixed and absolutely valid, for me. As soon as the first chord is struck I immediately smell the tartness of the sap, and both together mean to me: spring is on the way. “This private association of mine is a precious possession I would not willingly give up.
But the fact that two sensual experiences leap up every time I think, ‘spring is coming’ — that fact is my own personal affair. It can be communicated, certainly, as I have communicated it to you just now. But it cannot be transmitted. I can make you understand my association, but I cannot so affect a single one of you that my private association will become a valid symbol for you in your turn, a mechanism which infallibly reacts on call and always follows the same course.”

I thought of this with every turn of the page, seemingly, as I read The Angel of History. In her “Notes” at the back of the HarperPerennial paperback first from 1995 that I have in my hands, Forché writes that “The Angel of History is not about experience.” But, perhaps, it is about association.

I am of an age with the poet, a bit older, so that my experience of the 20th century is similar but my associations across differences of time and place and experiences mean that the “broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration” fragments from which the lines are constructed demand that I make an effort to connect my private association with hers. I have to do my uttermost to cross the distance by way of the tools of language that we share.

It is a truth that I am not content to admit that I am a sometimes lazy reader of poetry. I find a poet, develop a reading relationship with their poetics, and read and reread. Stepping into the unknown with a new-to-me poet is work, sometimes hard work. In the course of reading The Angel of History, I had to, in reading it once, in effect, read it multiple times, going back and back again in search of a rhythm that would carry me through the “broken, haunted, and in ruins” landscape of the text, allow me to witness alongside the poet but from my own perspective.

Worth it? Absolutely. One to shelve alongside those others to which I return again and again.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Angel of History is a unique collection of poetry in five parts, where the poet steps in to the lives of those devastated by war and oppression and writes through their lives.

For the most part, the poetry is very effective. It would have been helpful for someone not as fluent in French as perhaps she should be to have footnotes instead of notes in the back of the book to assist with translation but never mind. Also, a lot of lines are lifted and rightly attributed to other writers and notables from history. It's again effective to have actual primary source documentation to bring home the point, but a part of me wishes the poet would have reached a bit further into herself and found her own words and ideas in their entirety.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

So powerful.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

(read for Loft Mentorship Program 2012-2013)

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end." (19)

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in this volume were haunting, ghostly, and mostly felt wispy and out of my reach. Forche expertly repeated lines throughout the volume, such that you knew a line was familiar and had seen it before, but couldn't quite recall if you read it in this book, or heard it years ago or in a dream. Favorite lines/poems:

A rain through raised windows, as in: you must not forget anything: the hours, hope,
sleeplessness,
and the trains, you must not forgive them.
Smoke rising from the fields, the death of a husband, winter's
breath and the moonlight that reached the pallet.
Hunger, and the knife of waking, the cold knife.
--
There was so much weeping, she said, but never anyone.
A language even paper would refuse,
bell music rolling down the cold roofs,
their footsteps disappearing as they walked.

She stood on the landing of disbelief in Brno as if the war were translucent behind us,
the little ones in graves the size of pillows.
--

In April, the lilacs comes, wrapped in Le Monde.
"A plane went down in Warsaw this afternoon."
There was time to image it: a wedding dress hanging in a toolshed outside Warsaw.
--
A tall light entered the room. The windows, hand blown, were those of occupied Paris
I was waiting for the child's birth.
There were cut tulips in the glass. *[very Plath-like]*
--
Smoke wrote from its fire something brief
in the city of what could be said.
As if a cemetery were a field of doors. Requia crying against the walls. Little roofs of
moonlight
The ecstasy of standing outside oneself--

Anna said "carry this" and "follow behind me."
The earth is tired and marked, human after human.
--
In the cafe across from Zivnostenska banka we ae able to buy
a sack of bread for the road, and poppies.
In the tin light we walk, our sandwiches in foil
like the light along Narodni, street of the kiosks.

The wind has eaten the faces from the angels of Charles Bridge
as if the earth were finished with us.

We leave our konvalinka for the saint, white tulips for the mother of God.
--
A row of cabanas with white towels near restorative waters where once it was possible
to be cured
A town of vacant summer houses
Mists burning the slightest lapse of sea
--
At the moment when the snow geese lifted, thousands at once after days of crying in
the wetlands
At once they lifted in a single ascent, acres of wind in their wingbones
Wetlands of morning light in their lift moving as one over the continent
As a white front, one in their radiance, in their crying, a cloud of one desire
--
The poem "The Garden Shukkei-en"

[Kaylee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had mentioned to my boyfriend that I was reading this, and he said, "I always thought of poetry as something to be sipped". However, in this case, I think it really does need to be gulped -- the polyphonic nature woven throughout the different poems really did seem to work best as a whole. Perhaps, if I were more of a poetry person, I would go back and do a slower, more spaced-out reading.

I'm not a poetry person, though. I should never be allowed to read poetry (and honestly, shouldn't even post this, because it's not fair to include my rating, but since I've always used this profile as a personal way of tracking my reading, I'm not changing that...).

As far as poetry goes, this was actually one of the more readable collections for me. And, I think the main part of that was because of the final note in the back, with some translations and where she got certain lines or why she used certain things. Context helps me, a non-lover-of-poetry, appreciate it. And I certainly liked the juxtaposition of the many different stories centered around the same basic ideas.

[Parker Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful and harrowing poems I’ve read. Forché’s poem explores themes of loss, religion, and the ugliness that is virtually inseparable from life and society. The imagery used by Forché is reminiscent of Mansour’s surreal descriptions, yet still describes reality in a mostly comprehensible manner. I definitely plan to read this poem again, as I believe it will take a few reads to fully grasp its depth. Forché masterfully utilizes ideas and phrases from a handful of other writers and in so doing, brings several voices into this discourse on the tragedy and evil of our time. From the first to the final line, this was beautiful and thought-provoking. I included the first two lines below, because this was what piqued my interest in the book.

“There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world. When French was the secret music of the street, the café, the train, my own receded and became intimacy and sleep.”

[Davide · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is epic, sweeping, ambitious, finely made, and woven by a lush high lyricism. On its own terms, the book is great, but I left feeling weary about "poetry of witness" at large. The strategy of the book admits to orchestrating a polyvocal account of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, but the authority the poet assumes to stylistically orchestrate and swivel about violences gave me pause. The effect is a catalog of tragedy--images and phrases that many of us have not forgotten--which feels somewhat spectacularizing. I thought of the responses of some poets who were contemporaries of WWII, like Paul Celan, who contended that the artful deployment of silence was the most honest way of accounting for the grief that has racked the world. Finishing Forche's book, I feel Celan may be right.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poetry about war, resistance, survival, family, and hope.

from The Angel of History: "In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed-upon lie, and it bound me to / itself, demanding of my life an explanation."

from The Notebook of Uprising: "One went to sweep the schools clean in a mountain town. Another took his life but / where did he take it? / Don't believe Western news reports: a carnival of resistance. Rather, think of it this way: you / are an insomniac who has gone to bed on an ordinary August night."

from Elegy: "The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour / the bottle in your cot half vodka half winter light. / To what and to who does one say yes? / If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?"