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The Country Between Us: The Achingly Sensual Political Poetry from a Journalist in El Salvador
“Here is 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
The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn 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.
The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn 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.
59 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 1981
53 people are currently reading
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About the author
Carolyn Forché
58 books401 followersCarolyn 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 153 reviews
October 11, 2019
The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. (p. 16, “The Colonel”)
A woman who comes home with you / from a long bar night of smoke and poker. / You take her panties to your face / and it is all you have and all / your father had and all your brothers. / With you they dip their lines / to that silent and promising / water of summer, hoping / as they hoped for more than fish. (p. 42, “Joseph”)
In the mass graves, a woman’s hand / caged in the ribs of her child, / a single stone in Spain beneath olives, / in Germany the silent windy fields, / in the Soviet Union where the snow / is scarred with wire, in Salvador / where blood will never soak / into the ground, everywhere and always / go after that which is lost. / There is a cyclone fence between / ourselves and the slaughter and behind it / we hover in a calm protected world like / netted fish, exactly like netted fish. / It is either the beginning or the end / of the world, and the choice is ourselves / or nothing. (p. 59, “Ourselves or Nothing)
Fascinating reading these poems for the first time after having read Forché’s recent memoir What You Have Heard Is True, now shortlisted for the National Book Award. The poems here leave me a little breathless. I know a poem has reached me if it haunts me through some cadence or image. The poems have a strong narrative element; all are set around 1978-80 or so. They are about the author’s courageous time in El Salvador (which is the subject of the new memoir), a stubborn American Trotskyite languishing in a Czechoslovakian prison, libidinous girlfriends lost track of, a soldier home from Vietnam, a lover gone before his time.
I would also like to recommend a later volume of Forché’s, The Angel of History, where her acts of witness seem to broaden to take in all of Eastern Europe. There’s some of that here, too. See the third excerpt above. This work, so set on marking the suffering of others, reminds me in its essential motivation, not in its style or music so much, but in its big-hearted compassion, of the work of Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz.
January 25, 2018
"in the mass graves a woman's hand,
cagged in the ribs of her child.
A single stone in Spain beneath the olives,
in Germany the silent windy fields,
in the Soviet Union where the snow
is scarred with wire,
in Salvador where the blood will
never soak into the ground.
Everywhere and always
go after that which is lost.
There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter
and behind it we have our inner calm
protected world like netted fish.
Exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning
or the end of the world.
And the choice is ourselves or nothing"
cagged in the ribs of her child.
A single stone in Spain beneath the olives,
in Germany the silent windy fields,
in the Soviet Union where the snow
is scarred with wire,
in Salvador where the blood will
never soak into the ground.
Everywhere and always
go after that which is lost.
There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter
and behind it we have our inner calm
protected world like netted fish.
Exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning
or the end of the world.
And the choice is ourselves or nothing"
Read
August 14, 201810/10
BECAUSE ONE IS ALWAYS FORGOTTEN
In Memoriam, José Rudolfo Viera, 1939-1981: El Salvador
When Viera was buried we knew it had come to an end,
his coffin rocking into the ground like a boat or a cradle.
I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a campesino
and he would cut it up and give it back:
you can't eat heart in those four dark
chambers where a man can be kept for years.
A boy-soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife
to peel the face from a dead man
and hang it from the branch of a tree
flowering with such faces.
The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.
BECAUSE ONE IS ALWAYS FORGOTTEN
In Memoriam, José Rudolfo Viera, 1939-1981: El Salvador
When Viera was buried we knew it had come to an end,
his coffin rocking into the ground like a boat or a cradle.
I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a campesino
and he would cut it up and give it back:
you can't eat heart in those four dark
chambers where a man can be kept for years.
A boy-soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife
to peel the face from a dead man
and hang it from the branch of a tree
flowering with such faces.
The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.
January 29, 2020
"Now this feel of knife for fish
of bullet for something racing through
the darkness, your voice
slung on the wires that lapse
scalloping the cold length
of the country between us." - from "Joseph"
When you read enough poetry, you become use to the tropes and stereotypes. You assume from who a poet is--what they look like, what you're gonna get. I don't mind this, because I believe there is something valuable in everybody's experience. So I'm able to get the most out of something, whether it is by Langston Hughes or Dylan Thomas or Emily Dickinson or Maya Angelou I absorb it. Like James Baldwin said, I claim it all. So when I read an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates some of his favorite books, I came across someone who I had never heard of called Carolyn Forché, with her face darkened on the cover I was intrigued. The small description was about just one poem, but I think the mystique of the cover was enough for me.
I thought, "woman goes abroad and sees some things." I'd read stuff like that before and I thought I knew what I was getting into. At first, I looked to have been right and was confident I could finish this book in 2 hours tops. Then we get her most famous poem, "The Colonel":
"It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing." - from "Ourselves or Nothing"
of bullet for something racing through
the darkness, your voice
slung on the wires that lapse
scalloping the cold length
of the country between us." - from "Joseph"
When you read enough poetry, you become use to the tropes and stereotypes. You assume from who a poet is--what they look like, what you're gonna get. I don't mind this, because I believe there is something valuable in everybody's experience. So I'm able to get the most out of something, whether it is by Langston Hughes or Dylan Thomas or Emily Dickinson or Maya Angelou I absorb it. Like James Baldwin said, I claim it all. So when I read an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates some of his favorite books, I came across someone who I had never heard of called Carolyn Forché, with her face darkened on the cover I was intrigued. The small description was about just one poem, but I think the mystique of the cover was enough for me.
I thought, "woman goes abroad and sees some things." I'd read stuff like that before and I thought I knew what I was getting into. At first, I looked to have been right and was confident I could finish this book in 2 hours tops. Then we get her most famous poem, "The Colonel":
"WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carriedI was literally knocked in the mouth (as the kids say now, "I caught a fade"). That's how I knew I've been getting too complacent, too comfortable. Throughout my life plenty of rappers had hit me like that with lyrics, but never a white woman from Detroit. She doesn't let up for the rest of the book, in-fact she doubles doubles down. This has been called, war poetry and political poetry, but Forché calls it "the poetry of witness." I've been listening to this sort of content all my life. I know other poets write like this, but all my mind can call on first is rappers--in particular one project came to my mind: Nas' Illmatic. I felt the same minimalistic grittiness of that album and after I read this book I re-listened to that album just to be sure. Now a days, no one makes poetry like The Country Between Us and nobody, not even Nas, makes music like Illmatic.
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
May 1978"
"It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing." - from "Ourselves or Nothing"
February 1, 2022
Occasionally, a poet is in the right place at the right time, and has the talent to express what needs to be said. In World War I, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon expressed in verse the outrage of a generation sent to the slaughterhouse by old men who never deigned to go close enough to the front lines to understand the hell their Olympian policies and plans of attack had created. For Central America in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s, Carolyn Forche’ was a voice for those who suffered the tender mercies of the Salvadoran death squads; her clear-eyed reporting, in her poems, was the counterpoint to those who claimed communism in Latin America had to be defeated by any means necessary, at a time when Reagan was declaring the tyrants in El Salvador and Guatemala to be men “of great integrity”.
This book of poetry was written decades before Forche’s account of her years in Central America, What You Have Heard is True. My recommendation is to read What You Have Heard is True, and then read The Country Between Us; done this way, the poetry will have meaning the reader would not grasp as fully if the poetry is read first. Also, What You Have Heard is a stunning achievement of witness; it is the best non-fiction book I have read in at least a year, and it opened my eyes in a way that nothing else has to the perfidy of the American involvement in Central America.
What Carolyn Forche’ is trying to achieve in her poetry is to rip away the blindfold that most of us wear regarding terrible events occurring in far off places; for the American people to see clearly what was being done to people in Central America who had done nothing to deserve the horrific treatment they received, financed by the American taxpayer. The military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala were unquestionably evil; it would have required only the most cursory on-the-ground inspection of their tactics to see this, but the representatives of the U.S. Government in the State Department, the Army, and the CIA were willfully blind to that reality. If all that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, the United States did less than nothing. Reagan’s government actively supported mass murderers in Central America.
Forche’s most famous poem, The Colonel, is based on a real interview; she interviewed many senior officials in Salvador. In 1979 I met a similar colonel in Uruguay, when that country was under military dictatorship and the Uruguayan Army was brutally suppressing the Tupamaros, a group which had already been defeated but was still the anti-communist bogeyman; the oppression was in fact directed at anyone considered at all leftist or an opponent of the government in the least way. The colonel I met when I was a 19-year-old Cadet on an exchange program had the same killer’s dead eyes that that Forche’ describes in her book. As in Salvador, the “anti-communist” crackdown in Uruguay was simply a way to suppress all dissent. I remember driving by a checkpoint at night with an Uruguayan lieutenant, and seeing a young, bearded man slumped in a metal chair outside the guardhouse, hands manacled behind him. “Un Tupamaro”, the lieutenant replied to my question, “Quien es?”. As if that explained everything.
Some critics, Eliot Weinberger in particular, initially took issue with Forche’s book, saying her poems reduced El Salvador to a story about herself, that she was a “tourist of revolution”. I do not agree at all; a poet writes about what she knows and has experienced personally, if she wants her poems to have any force. Did Wilfred Owen reduce WW1 to a story about himself? Clearly many of his poems were about what he saw, what he experienced as a lieutenant in the front lines, but that does not reduce the power of his words; it enhances them. I think Weinberger’s criticism of Forche’ in that regard is silly in the extreme, if for no other reason than Forche’ took grave chances with her life in even traveling to Salvador, and she was with the resistance in person; she finally left the country only at the insistence of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who recognized the danger she was in and wanted her to be a voice for the people of El Salvador in America and Europe. Romero was himself gunned down only one week after he urged Carolyn to leave. At that point in El Salvador, as he knew clearly, no one was safe who opposed the government’s reign of terror, and he wanted Carolyn Forche’ to live, and to speak.
That said, not all the poems in this book ring true. The first part, the poems about Salvador, are the best, sin duda. The poems about her time in Europe have not all aged as well; they are a reflection of her younger, less worldly self. But as Forche’ herself said in an interview, it was well that she was so young and naïve when she went to Salvador, because had she known more about conditions there, she probably would have been too afraid to go. And rightly so. Her poems about love and her ex-husband are uneven at first reading, though one or two are poignant. Like most books of poetry, I will come back to this and re-read; some poems grow and improve upon re-reading, and I may find that some of hers that failed to move me at first will speak to me later.
It is sad that the Cold War effort, which defeated the Soviet Union, freed Eastern Europe, and strengthened democracy in the world in general was such a disaster for Central and South America. I have written elsewhere on GR about how Carolyn Forche’s writing has caused me to think deeply about Latin America again, and to consider after thirty-plus years the role of the military of which I was a part. My time in Honduras and in Uruguay was innocuous on a personal level, thank god, but I was nonetheless a part of a wrong-headed effort in the region which supported dictators who were killing their people with U.S. support. The tyrants and their armies in these countries fought not to defeat communism, but to stay in charge and prevent the rise of democratic government. Her poems are not overtly political, nor were they meant to be, as she herself has stressed. They are meant only to say, “take off the blindfold, open your eyes, and see”.
This book of poetry was written decades before Forche’s account of her years in Central America, What You Have Heard is True. My recommendation is to read What You Have Heard is True, and then read The Country Between Us; done this way, the poetry will have meaning the reader would not grasp as fully if the poetry is read first. Also, What You Have Heard is a stunning achievement of witness; it is the best non-fiction book I have read in at least a year, and it opened my eyes in a way that nothing else has to the perfidy of the American involvement in Central America.
What Carolyn Forche’ is trying to achieve in her poetry is to rip away the blindfold that most of us wear regarding terrible events occurring in far off places; for the American people to see clearly what was being done to people in Central America who had done nothing to deserve the horrific treatment they received, financed by the American taxpayer. The military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala were unquestionably evil; it would have required only the most cursory on-the-ground inspection of their tactics to see this, but the representatives of the U.S. Government in the State Department, the Army, and the CIA were willfully blind to that reality. If all that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, the United States did less than nothing. Reagan’s government actively supported mass murderers in Central America.
Forche’s most famous poem, The Colonel, is based on a real interview; she interviewed many senior officials in Salvador. In 1979 I met a similar colonel in Uruguay, when that country was under military dictatorship and the Uruguayan Army was brutally suppressing the Tupamaros, a group which had already been defeated but was still the anti-communist bogeyman; the oppression was in fact directed at anyone considered at all leftist or an opponent of the government in the least way. The colonel I met when I was a 19-year-old Cadet on an exchange program had the same killer’s dead eyes that that Forche’ describes in her book. As in Salvador, the “anti-communist” crackdown in Uruguay was simply a way to suppress all dissent. I remember driving by a checkpoint at night with an Uruguayan lieutenant, and seeing a young, bearded man slumped in a metal chair outside the guardhouse, hands manacled behind him. “Un Tupamaro”, the lieutenant replied to my question, “Quien es?”. As if that explained everything.
Some critics, Eliot Weinberger in particular, initially took issue with Forche’s book, saying her poems reduced El Salvador to a story about herself, that she was a “tourist of revolution”. I do not agree at all; a poet writes about what she knows and has experienced personally, if she wants her poems to have any force. Did Wilfred Owen reduce WW1 to a story about himself? Clearly many of his poems were about what he saw, what he experienced as a lieutenant in the front lines, but that does not reduce the power of his words; it enhances them. I think Weinberger’s criticism of Forche’ in that regard is silly in the extreme, if for no other reason than Forche’ took grave chances with her life in even traveling to Salvador, and she was with the resistance in person; she finally left the country only at the insistence of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who recognized the danger she was in and wanted her to be a voice for the people of El Salvador in America and Europe. Romero was himself gunned down only one week after he urged Carolyn to leave. At that point in El Salvador, as he knew clearly, no one was safe who opposed the government’s reign of terror, and he wanted Carolyn Forche’ to live, and to speak.
That said, not all the poems in this book ring true. The first part, the poems about Salvador, are the best, sin duda. The poems about her time in Europe have not all aged as well; they are a reflection of her younger, less worldly self. But as Forche’ herself said in an interview, it was well that she was so young and naïve when she went to Salvador, because had she known more about conditions there, she probably would have been too afraid to go. And rightly so. Her poems about love and her ex-husband are uneven at first reading, though one or two are poignant. Like most books of poetry, I will come back to this and re-read; some poems grow and improve upon re-reading, and I may find that some of hers that failed to move me at first will speak to me later.
It is sad that the Cold War effort, which defeated the Soviet Union, freed Eastern Europe, and strengthened democracy in the world in general was such a disaster for Central and South America. I have written elsewhere on GR about how Carolyn Forche’s writing has caused me to think deeply about Latin America again, and to consider after thirty-plus years the role of the military of which I was a part. My time in Honduras and in Uruguay was innocuous on a personal level, thank god, but I was nonetheless a part of a wrong-headed effort in the region which supported dictators who were killing their people with U.S. support. The tyrants and their armies in these countries fought not to defeat communism, but to stay in charge and prevent the rise of democratic government. Her poems are not overtly political, nor were they meant to be, as she herself has stressed. They are meant only to say, “take off the blindfold, open your eyes, and see”.
May 13, 2007
If you haven't read this book, you really need to. Seriously. El Salvador, the disappeared, the problem of making a difference in the world, the problem of being an American. It's amazing. I first read The Country Between Us years and years ago, and I reread it probably twice a year. And pick it up more often than that to read an individual poem.
March 2, 2008
I shouldn't really be rating this because I don't know a damn thing about poetry, but I enjoyed it (what does that mean, anyway, to say that we enjoyed or didn't enjoy something that we don't really understand, or against which we have a prejudice? I don't read poetry because 1. I don't know anything about it, and 2. I don't like it, but which came first? I pose it as a conundrum but it's not difficult: I don't like things I don't understand, which is obvious, and I do find that when I attempt to understand something that initially eludes me, I find myself liking it more and more, like _Cambridge_ last month; regardless of all that, though, even if I do find that I've come to understand this book, and to like it, it doesn't say anything about the merits of the book itself, but rather, about my grappling with my own 1. ignorance, and 2. limitations in taste. Ignorance can be improved by study and effort, but limitations in taste? I don't know. I rather pride myself on my broad and intelligent taste, and I'm dismayed by my narrowness wrt poetry). Anyway. I picked this up in an attempt to broaden my reading choices a little, but not too much; I'd read "The Colonel," of course, and so was expecting a kind of prose poemy style. Which the rest of the collection doesn't have, but her poetry in this volume should still be very accessible to people who are accustomed to reading 20th century personal prose--it's written in sentences, and I dig sentences. So, it's accessible (to me), and it's like reading a novel with wide margins, and I love the stuff about the pitfalls of identifying yourself with the political causes you take on. And like Forche's narrator (god, does this kind of poetry HAVE narrators?), I believe that while it's necessary to be aware of the limitations of your identification (just because you care about war in El Salvador does not make you a victim or participant of the war in El Salvador), that is never, ever an excuse not to attempt to identify (just because you're not a participant or victim of the war in El Salvador doesn't mean that you're let off the hook--you must care, and you must engage with it).
So, did I wind up broadening my reading? I don't think so. I found something that suited my tastes as they already were. But that's fun too.
So, did I wind up broadening my reading? I don't think so. I found something that suited my tastes as they already were. But that's fun too.
July 13, 2014
As a poet myself, Carolyn Forché was formative, both because of her restrained power ("The Colonel") and her passion for Central America under siege. As a contemporary of Forché, and like so many others of my generation, I could not forget the anguish I felt during those years of bloodshed and tragedy. I do believe that the fact I am currently spending hours a day researching information for a work of historical fiction about the Revolution in Nicaragua, is due to the emotional and ethical impact of this book of poems. And as I learn something new, I am often moved to write a poem. If I could thank her personally, I would.
March 8, 2008
The central metaphor in Ms. Forché’s second volume of poetry, captured in its title, “the country between us” (44), represents distance in its physical manifestations and also in its emotional variations. The poems, whether of witness to the bloody revolts in Salvador or of witness to the emotional violence of coming back to America after war, experiment with distances: the geographical distance of old friends (“Joseph”), the distance of life experiences (“As Children Together”), or finally, and most prevalently, the distance between who we were and who we have become (“Reunion,” “Selective Service,” “For the Stranger”). It is not until the last poem of the collection that the poet offers any reconciliation of these chasms she so expertly examines, and in that offering, she only gives the reader a choice between “ourselves/or nothing” (59). In other words, we must look to the closest being in our proximity, ourselves, before we can really see anything else in the vast world in which we live.
Ms. Forché’s skill at pacing by adding brute, dense imagery is very impressive, and made me read each poem two or three times. The ease with which she can lay bare the grossest of images (“testicles are crushed like eggs,” 20) along with the most tender moments between lovers (“the tongues swishing/in my dress,” 48), taught me a great deal about tone, and how it can work with a poem’s images
Ms. Forché’s skill at pacing by adding brute, dense imagery is very impressive, and made me read each poem two or three times. The ease with which she can lay bare the grossest of images (“testicles are crushed like eggs,” 20) along with the most tender moments between lovers (“the tongues swishing/in my dress,” 48), taught me a great deal about tone, and how it can work with a poem’s images
September 14, 2019
“All things human take time, time which the damned never have, time for life to repair at least the worst of its wounds.”
Beautiful, sad, moving–these are just some adjectives used to explain the emotions Carolyn Forché's poems had on me. I took my time reading through this collection; often rereading her poems. Her powerful writing creates strong visuals and emotions that I’m not soon to forget.
Beautiful, sad, moving–these are just some adjectives used to explain the emotions Carolyn Forché's poems had on me. I took my time reading through this collection; often rereading her poems. Her powerful writing creates strong visuals and emotions that I’m not soon to forget.
November 14, 2020
"We take it with us, the cry / of a train slicing a field / leaving its stiff suture, a distant / tenderness as when rails slip / behind us and our windows / touch the field, where it seems / the dead are awake and so reach / for each other... / I am the woman whose photograph / you will not recognize, whose face / emptied your eyes, whose eyes / were brief, like the smallest / of cities we slipped through" (33).
Denise Levertov and Margaret Atwood liked it. I wanted to like it more.
Denise Levertov and Margaret Atwood liked it. I wanted to like it more.
Read
November 23, 2023i'd describe as a book u need a hug after, I'd read a few of these - 'The Colonel' and 'As Children Together' in separate settings & they're incred poems... I hadn't expected the rest of the book to manage that weight, the calibre. I have a lot of love for 'The Stranger'. easily one of the best collections of the 80s
August 5, 2009
The Country Between Us is one of those kind of books that comes along at a particular time in your life, making the world spin a little faster on its axis. I read this while on tour with a rock band, making our way through the brutal heat of a Nevada desert, and the words came alive right before my eyes. Some of the images, such as a Colonel who collects body part souvenirs and spills a jar of ears on the ground (the ones that fell facing the floor couldn't hear what the Colonial was saying), are so vivid and painful that they carry the static charge of a news event. A really tough and wonderful book.
December 3, 2016
Damn. It's rare that I devour a book of poetry, cover to cover, as I would fiction. Readable, beautiful, harrowing, moving.
August 24, 2022
Can't wait to read this one again and again throughout my life
April 1, 2020
What is there to be said? This is a landmark collection of poems which solidified poetry of witness as a genre for American readers. The powerfully moving docu-poems in the first section that centre on the Salvadoran Civil War, including the famous ‘The Colonel’, are as haunting now as they must have been when they appeared forty years ago. This slim book has plenty to offer, and Forché’s control of tone, of pairing the dark with the light, the brutal with the beautiful, the political with the personal, continues to impress.
April 8, 2008
Is there a modern poet who can combine the personal and political better than Forche?
My favorite pieces: Joseph, Return, and Ourselves Or Nothing.
Fantastic work. A stunning (in all possible meanings), beautiful voice.
My favorite pieces: Joseph, Return, and Ourselves Or Nothing.
Fantastic work. A stunning (in all possible meanings), beautiful voice.
November 12, 2014
"The General," "Photograph of My Room," and other wonderful descriptive works full of dramatic and haunting imagery....
March 14, 2012
Fantastic. How is it that it's taken me this long to read this? Stunning, absolutely.
February 18, 2019
I tried not to write about Carolyn Forche this week, but on account of not being able to finish another book, I find myself here, having to write about Forche.
One of the reasons a critic might reasonably avoid writing about Forche is that her poems take time to develop – not just on the page, but in the mind. Their center of gravity is always beyond the instant, and as a result, the reader is left with the impression that any talk of the poems themselves must reach beyond the words from which the poems are made. Take, for example, the ostensible prose poem “The Colonel,” which details the speaker’s encounter with a military official whose collusion in El Salvador’s violent regime slowly becomes more evident. The poem proceeds by mollifying the reader with detail: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar… There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the / cushion beside him” (16). The addition of the word “cushion” here suggests: perhaps the pistol is normal, can be forgiven, can be seen as an everyday object. Later, domestic words are used to describe the house’s barriers: “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to / scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.” Scooping, lace, later detached human ears described as “dried peach halves,” these are all artifacts of Forche’s gift for describing the ultra-violent using the language of the everyday. Violence, she seems to argue, is neither visible nor invisible; it is readily apparent only in the mundane details of our lives, woven seamlessly into the objects we use to signal our innocence.
It is for this reason that writing about Forche is difficult. The poem itself, for all of its understated, factual qualities (there are no exclamations or wheeling rhapsodies here) seems to present itself as both factually exhaustive and emotionally incomplete. Yes, we recognize that in the midst of “the wind jostling lemons… dogs ticking across the terraces… the cries of those who vanish / might take years to get here” (9, “San Onofre, California”). What we don’t understand is how we could possibly feel both at once: the everyday bliss of a Southern vacation and the haunting thereof. Forche refuses to trade one reality for the other; she also refuses to resolve the contradiction, rather asking that we choose:
“There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.” (59, “Ourselves or Nothing”)
So, again, while the poems themselves seem chiefly concerned with the past in different ways (the first section is even dated 1978 – 1980; a later poem addresses “Prague, 1968 – 1978” or “Winter 1969”), the poems take their power from the involvement of the reader, which is precisely what takes time. In this sense, Forche achieves a kind of Brechtian self-reckoning by using the objects of our daily life to put into question our own experiences; unlike Brecht, she is interested in the vehicle not of artificial theatricality, but of uncanny naturalness. The uncanniness is this: the poems indicate no moral line in the world; they cover murder with the same matter-of-factness as they would a passing bird. As a result, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort, which arises from the lines we have drawn inside ourselves.
One of the reasons a critic might reasonably avoid writing about Forche is that her poems take time to develop – not just on the page, but in the mind. Their center of gravity is always beyond the instant, and as a result, the reader is left with the impression that any talk of the poems themselves must reach beyond the words from which the poems are made. Take, for example, the ostensible prose poem “The Colonel,” which details the speaker’s encounter with a military official whose collusion in El Salvador’s violent regime slowly becomes more evident. The poem proceeds by mollifying the reader with detail: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar… There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the / cushion beside him” (16). The addition of the word “cushion” here suggests: perhaps the pistol is normal, can be forgiven, can be seen as an everyday object. Later, domestic words are used to describe the house’s barriers: “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to / scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.” Scooping, lace, later detached human ears described as “dried peach halves,” these are all artifacts of Forche’s gift for describing the ultra-violent using the language of the everyday. Violence, she seems to argue, is neither visible nor invisible; it is readily apparent only in the mundane details of our lives, woven seamlessly into the objects we use to signal our innocence.
It is for this reason that writing about Forche is difficult. The poem itself, for all of its understated, factual qualities (there are no exclamations or wheeling rhapsodies here) seems to present itself as both factually exhaustive and emotionally incomplete. Yes, we recognize that in the midst of “the wind jostling lemons… dogs ticking across the terraces… the cries of those who vanish / might take years to get here” (9, “San Onofre, California”). What we don’t understand is how we could possibly feel both at once: the everyday bliss of a Southern vacation and the haunting thereof. Forche refuses to trade one reality for the other; she also refuses to resolve the contradiction, rather asking that we choose:
“There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.” (59, “Ourselves or Nothing”)
So, again, while the poems themselves seem chiefly concerned with the past in different ways (the first section is even dated 1978 – 1980; a later poem addresses “Prague, 1968 – 1978” or “Winter 1969”), the poems take their power from the involvement of the reader, which is precisely what takes time. In this sense, Forche achieves a kind of Brechtian self-reckoning by using the objects of our daily life to put into question our own experiences; unlike Brecht, she is interested in the vehicle not of artificial theatricality, but of uncanny naturalness. The uncanniness is this: the poems indicate no moral line in the world; they cover murder with the same matter-of-factness as they would a passing bird. As a result, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort, which arises from the lines we have drawn inside ourselves.
August 31, 2019
Reading this after reading Forché'
What You Have Heard Is True
, I expected the poems about El Salvador to be powerful, and they were — and knowing the background story deepened the experience immensely. But I was just as enthralled by the personal poems as well, mostly tales of shared solitude in cities around the world, haunted by violence and longing, set against a backdrop of blue winter.
February 24, 2023
Goddamn. I really thought I was gonna be annoyed by this, like it would have the aura of someone who uses their trust fund to live in Bangladesh for a year and comes back thinking she understands poverty and refugees or something and even has the audacity to write poetry about it. But wow this is just perfect. Every other poem was my favorite poem in the book, you can tell she probably wrote hundreds to get to these few pages. There was a way in which, without telling you how she feels, just by describing something, you feel as if you can understand her entire world, can know her as a human being by the way she writes a single word
June 27, 2020
I come to know about Carolyn Forche late. But the power of this book of poems has not diminished in the almost 40 years since publication.
Forche is the sort of poet that is absolutely necessary.
What heavy and sad knowledge she carries:
"There is nothing one man will not do to another."
Forche is the sort of poet that is absolutely necessary.
What heavy and sad knowledge she carries:
"There is nothing one man will not do to another."
February 6, 2022
Odd little book one that drips with visceral details of death and torture while being romantic with a forced sort of naivete and some of the poems I just didn't quite understand but the feeling was one of traveling from culture to culture different parts of the world Central America, Old Europe, and Native American not sure how they all blend together Odd little book like I said three stars.
January 7, 2025
In beautifully articulate language, Forché delves into issues both micro and macro with open-hearted empathy and a fine-tuned eye for detail. I have the urge to reread this almost immediately, and I don’t know any higher compliment than that.
November 13, 2023
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
December 27, 2021
I genuinely think this is a great book. It's very well written and poignant, and some phrases are lasting. I wish I had delved more into Forché's real life story before reading this because I know she was writing about her experiences in Salvador as an activist. At first, I did not know that, and I only realized after a quick Google search, and as soon as I had that context, the poems became much more layered and thought provoking.
This is political poetry if such a genre exists and it's the first time I had read something along those lines. I think Forché did the past justice and told her story with passion, courage and tenderness. As I said, I just wish I had more context because then I think I would have loved it.
The collection is worth reading and I like some of the ways she strings two thoughts together. Here is an example:
"It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing."
Wow.
This is political poetry if such a genre exists and it's the first time I had read something along those lines. I think Forché did the past justice and told her story with passion, courage and tenderness. As I said, I just wish I had more context because then I think I would have loved it.
The collection is worth reading and I like some of the ways she strings two thoughts together. Here is an example:
"It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing."
Wow.
Read
September 24, 2008Every time I read this book, it feels so different: different poems stand out. The poems I remember fit together in new ways. The poems I've forgotten change the scope of the book.
I think this was one of the books that sparked the most discussion in grad school. Does Forche' attempt to give voice to people whose voice she cannot represent? Is her perspective complete? Do her questions guide us toward a just way of thinking? What can we learn about writing about ourselves and others from Forche's poems about Salvador?
This read, the first half of the book is Salvador and the American outlook, and the second half takes place in winter. I didn't remember how coated the second half is in snow.
Of the first poems, I'd say yes, the questions are right: difficult to ask, perhaps impossible to answer, and right. The speaker in these poems never pretends to understand the experience of Salvadorans but, rather, is always an American caught between her own country and what she witnesses. What is her role?
The poems "As Children Together" and "Joseph" stood out to me more this time, perhaps because they are written explicitly to particular people (although she does that earlier, too), and/or perhaps because the speaker in these poems speaks with so much more authority than she does in the others. She knows. After the implicit and overt questioning of the earlier poems, the knowing speaker of these two pieces comes off as nearly arrogant... but not.
Still one of my favorites is "Departure":
"...Your hand
cups the light of a match
to your mouth, to mine, and I want
to ask if the dead hold
their mouths in their hands like this
to know what is left of them."
I think this was one of the books that sparked the most discussion in grad school. Does Forche' attempt to give voice to people whose voice she cannot represent? Is her perspective complete? Do her questions guide us toward a just way of thinking? What can we learn about writing about ourselves and others from Forche's poems about Salvador?
This read, the first half of the book is Salvador and the American outlook, and the second half takes place in winter. I didn't remember how coated the second half is in snow.
Of the first poems, I'd say yes, the questions are right: difficult to ask, perhaps impossible to answer, and right. The speaker in these poems never pretends to understand the experience of Salvadorans but, rather, is always an American caught between her own country and what she witnesses. What is her role?
The poems "As Children Together" and "Joseph" stood out to me more this time, perhaps because they are written explicitly to particular people (although she does that earlier, too), and/or perhaps because the speaker in these poems speaks with so much more authority than she does in the others. She knows. After the implicit and overt questioning of the earlier poems, the knowing speaker of these two pieces comes off as nearly arrogant... but not.
Still one of my favorites is "Departure":
"...Your hand
cups the light of a match
to your mouth, to mine, and I want
to ask if the dead hold
their mouths in their hands like this
to know what is left of them."
November 14, 2019
Powerful collection comprising an opening section of poems about the time Forche spent in El Salvador during the worst of the oppression. "The Visitor," "Return" and, especially, "The Colonel," which hits you with an image you won't forget, are powerful, but there's really no let-up. The second section revolves around the persona's attempts to forget human/sexual connections during times of political chaos, much centered in Eastern Europe (pre-fall of the Berlin Wall). The final long poem, "Ourselves Or Nothing," in part response to Anna Akhmatova's "Requieum," concludes with lines that speak to the center of Forche's vision:
There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing."
Also want to flag the anthology, Against Forgetting: The Poetry of Witness, which Forche edited out of the same historical moments.
There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing."
Also want to flag the anthology, Against Forgetting: The Poetry of Witness, which Forche edited out of the same historical moments.
April 21, 2014
This slim volume sends one gliding from the civil unrest of 1970s El Salvador to the steely Eastern Europe of the Cold War and into the forever-troubled pulse of all modernity. Author Carolyn Forche blends the personal and political into something deeper and more fecund with its ability to sear into one's mind a lyrical mixture of the beautiful and horrible. Gathering this world together without seam, The Country Between Us reflects back to us that which is most difficult to view - the mire and complexity of our society - and alters it into that which cannot turned away from. The sensual language on display in these poems never oversteps the dramatic narratives unfolding from real experiences and remembrances. The resulting realization that everything within happened - the causal and cruel violent acts, the striking injustices, the moments of pure and transcendent glory - does not soon abate. This is a collection to be read again and again to relive its undeniable power to bear witness and change.
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