Blue Hour

by Carolyn Forché

"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.

Genres: Poetry, The United States Of America, War, Female Authors

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2003

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

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing Kept Hidden
The black fire of ink on paper took hold of their souls—incorporeal fire.
There was no protection this fire couldn’t touch nor darkness nor a moment.
It lasted as long as a dream it was no dream. Heteroglossia of nervous shortwave,
cloud of blown walls.
In the barracks, those who had sketched themselves in coal and smoke became
coal and smoke.
And the living remained, linking unknown things to the known: residue, scapular,
matchlight, name on a tongue.
Then, for an hour, the war slept, and rain filled the cisterns with silence.
Our windows faced east, and on August evenings, the sky was a blue no longer spoken.

—Beirut, winter 1983

Death and sheer enigmas.
A couple of poems and a few oxymorons (an almost 40-page poem is anything but a poem) whose level of abstractness makes them incomprehensible, something I cannot conceive after reading a writer like Anna Kamieńska, who has analysed the inexplicable most straightforwardly and transparently.

Sep. 7, 2021
* Actual rating: 2.5 stars
** Later on my blog.

[Marilyn McEntyre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've revisited Carolyn Forché's poetry from time to time, and recently picked this one up again. It was the right book at the right moment. Her poems remind me that good poetry requires courage. And that good poetry show how precision illuminates and enhances but doesn't dispel mystery. She moves with shocking grace from the horror of war to the exquisite gift of some small, ordinary, beautiful thing, reminding me once again how the personal and the political are inextricably entwined. She doesn't fear repetition, but uses it to slow us into reflection. She stops to play with words and their sounds in the middle of a poem that was going elsewhere, a little the way a child stops on a walk to splash in a puddle. She understands the power of the phrase: "On Earth," the 45-page poem that comprises the last half of the book, is a stirring, mesmerizing compendium of phrases that tug at the edges of consciousness and memory; it's not hard to read at one sitting because it's long, but because it opens door after door into places one needs or wants to venture into before going on. So worth the morning time I've given it these past days. I'm grateful.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

You see, one can live without having survived.
*

A viola, night-voiced, calls into its past but nothing comes.

A woman alone rows across the lake. Her life is intact, but
what she thought could never be taken has been taken.
An iron bridge railing one moment its shadow the next.

It is n’y voir que du bleu, it is blind to something.
Nevertheless.

Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.

[Candy Burkett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ethereal Travel into the Blue Hour

A dying body appears keenly aware of its soul tugging free and submerging into the space that is held for souls escaping the living and transitioning into the spiritual realm. The poems in Carolyn Forché’s book, Blue Hour, are guided by a female narrator, who passes in and out of consciousness during her recollections of memories and reality. Forché’s poetry reveals the narrator’s ability to examine the past, to exist in the present, and to foresee the future. In addition, darkness and light, as well as the reference to spirits and souls, are a consistent theme throughout the poems. Forché masterfully provides visual images of the themes and tone in her writing through her poetic style of language choices and vivid imagery. The poems possess shifting subjects, such as the intimate moments of the narrator’s son and deceased mother, mortality, tributes to victims of war, and the transition that the mind goes through as the body dies. Forché’s poetic style is seen through her visual imagery, abecedarian form, and precise placement of narrative pauses, which effectively emulates the emotions felt by the human mind as it passes in and out of consciousness.

The visual imagery in Forché’s poem titled, “Nocturne,” is vivid and powerful. The poem is an elegy to not only the narrator’s mind, but to all who will face mortality. Examples of the searing imagery can be seen through the narrator’s description of the afterlife: “The people of this world are moving into the next, and with them their hours and the ink of their ability to make thought / As a star plummets from darkness, a soul is exiled” (11-13). Forché skillfully evokes images of emptiness and darkness once a soul has left the earth and looks down on the world that is left behind: “Every spring I return to her, laying my thoughts to rest like a wreath on water / These are the words no longer. Here are the photographs taken when we were alive” (15). The feeling of emptiness is also poignantly conveyed in Forché’s descriptions of empty houses: “When the house was alive, its walls recorded the rising and falling of the bed, as if a wind” (12). The author skillfully summons up feelings of darkness, emptiness, and images of people and houses left behind by the dead.

Forché’s use of abecedarian form can be seen in the forty-six page poem titled, “On Earth.” The theme of war is depicted through the narrator’s obsessed mind and is cleverly portrayed through a flood of chant like statements, laid out in alphabetical order. An example of the arrangement of the narrator’s thoughts can be seen in the following stanzas, “for the rest of your life, search for them / ghost hands appearing in windows, rubbing them clear / his grave strewn with slipper flowers and sardine cans” (40-41). The narrator’s thoughts, at times, appear fragmented, yet the focus remains on the effects of war: “graves marked with scrap iron, a world in her dead eye, grief of leave-taking, ground fog rising from a graveyard” (40). Forché’s use of abecedarian form powerfully demonstrates the obsessions of the narrator’s mind, through a prayer like tribute of what war has left behind.

The placement of the narrative pauses found in Forché’s poem titled, “Blue Hour,” creates meaningful breaks in the narrator’s thoughts, as well as shows moments in time when the narrator’s mind shifts from consciousness to unconsciousness. In the poem, the narrator appears to have one foot on earth and one foot inside the spiritual realm: “here, where there was almost nothing, we waited in the birch-lit clouds, holding the uncertain hand of a lost spirit” (7). Forché places a long dash, with several blank lines before the next thought begins, emphasizing a transition of the narrator’s mind leaving the spiritual realm and returning to life, as she reminisces about an intimate moment with her son: “When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding …” (7). Another example shows the narrator remembering a childhood experience, “At night I banged the brace against the wooden crib bars and cried …” (3). Directly after the line, Forché places several blank lines to infer another transition of the narrator, this time into the afterlife, “…From the quarry of souls they come into being: supernal lights, concealed light, light which has no end” (3). The author is able to convey an unstable mind within her narrator; a mind that continuously leaves the body, only to return to it again and again, as if uncertain of when to let go.

Carolyn Forché’s poetry in, Blue Hour, delivers an ethereal transformation of the human mind as it struggles to let go and embrace the spiritual world. Through Forché’s brilliant technique with visual imagery, abecedarian form, and strategically placed narrative pauses, the powerful images of what the mind must endure is conveyed through its travels in and out of consciousness, holding on to memories while transitioning into the spiritual realm. Memories must be remembered and knowledge of the afterlife must be embraced in preparation for death. Mortality is faced head on as the narrator endures a tugging of the soul through the memories and tributes to those left behind.

[Arlitia Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the poems I read when I want to go deep into truth-lit woods, travel far far from where I started, with no chance of finding my way back.

[Namankita Rana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is just, wow. Where can one even begin? Carolyn Forche is a master of imagery and language, and she uses her unique style to hit the reader hard, with haunting descriptions of war, of ruin, of love, and of course, of death.

I've seen other reviewers mention that the work can be hard to follow in some parts, which is certainly true. However, I don't necessarily see that as a negative -- that the author will elude me in some parts was almost expected of her, given the subject matter, and not something I can truly complain about.

I have an entire notebook scribbled with lines that struck me but I'll leave you with this one, from one of the opening passages --

'Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.'

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Afterdeath

from the quarry of souls they come into being
supernal lights, concealed light, that which has no end

that which thought cannot attain
the going-forth, the as yet cannot be heard

—as a flame is linked to its burning coal
to know not only what is, but the other of what is

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A silence approaching bees of the invisible or the scent of mint" (25).

The writer and critic John Bayley compared reading this text to gazing at a Monet canvas, and I adore that analogy. To all of the T.S. Eliot lovers, please read this. I think Forché's ambitious "On Earth" is a fascinating poem to compare to "The Waste Land" and the Four Quartets. In it, Forché chronicles the passage of the mind from life to death, using some of the most stunning images imaginable.

"How is it possible that I am living here, as if a childhood dream had found / an empty theater in which to mount a small production of its hopes?" (14).

[Malaena · Rating 5 out of 5]

i do not only find suicide literature, but suicide literature finds me. « the city, translucent, shattered but did not disappear » is how it felt like to move home/how it feels like to still be here some days. i refuse to quote from the forty page poem because it is a must read. simply the craziest alphabetical poem i have ever laid my eyes on, and also i sobbed at one point.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saw Forche read at the UND writer's conference. I first read Forche poetry in high school so she's been around a long time although she's only published four volumes.

The centerpiece of this book is a 42 page alphabet-indexed poem imitiating Gnostic abecedarian hymns. It's a poem of snippets, tiny moment, little images.

Here are a few of my favorites, which pulled from the overall work seem to form a little poem of their own:
as any backward look is fictive...born with a map of calamity in her palm...cathedral bells chiseling the winter air...if rope were writing he would have hanged himself...the stories nested, each opening to the next...the street's memory of abandoned shoes...while I lived in that other world, years went by in this one....

Forche has spent her entire adult life living in countries at war. She's got worlds of experience to draw on, and truly awe-inspiring skills with language.

[Claudia Cortese · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a wound, a trauma. No, it's many wounds and many traumas. It's a polyphonic cry in the darkness of history, an utterance as beautiful as it is unbearable. In short, this is one of the most stunning collections of poetry I have ever read. Throughout her career, Forche has anthologized the stories of countless traumas, atrocities, wars, thousands of poems that bear witness to experiences that test of limits of what a human being can endure. Out of this collecting and witnessing and anthologizing was born Blue Hour--fragmented, many-voiced, decentered. These are not narrative poems. They are not easy poems. They are the opening up of many wounds at once. Oof.

[Kirsten Kinnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably stunning.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful book of poetry, marked by both beauty and horror. A long poem, "On Earth" takes over most of the book, the rumination of a dying mind told in an alphabetical order. The beauty in these poems is tempered by images of war, destruction, and poverty.

[Bri · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 ⭐️

[Mcatania21 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blue Hour’s “On Earth” uses abecedarian to organize random moments in time. Each line acts as a snip-its of life observations. While abecedarians were traditionally used “for sacred compositions, such as prayers, hymns, and psalms,” this poem acts as an antithesis to religion. It questions God’s motives. While each line contains its own distinct thought, the poem is held together by the repetition of a letter or phrase in the beginning of each line. The first abecedarian set starts with “a” observation, while the second set of abecedarians start with a variety of words that contain the same consonant, with some repetition of the same first word.

Within the poem, negative imagery overpowers the positive to carry out themes of fear, abandonment, and emptiness (e.g.: A sudden reticence that seizes the heart/A telephone ringing in an empty house/
And in their eyes, years taken away from them/ Dwelling in apartness.

Forche also plays with color: blacks, whites, and blues to set a specific mood in her lines. Black connotes decay and death (e.g. a black coat/a black map of clouds on a lake/ Black soup/black storms/black fingernails/black daybreak/graves/an oven of birds). Blue is a metaphor for longing, that which escapes us: Blue wind/blue hands/blue sky/child’s blue hour/water. White describes that which survives: white rain/white road/bone child/winter/snow. Forche weaves in the colors of our lives like the way we experience our ups and downs, highs and lows of emotional experience.

Two clever anagrams I noticed were: A cup of sleep instead of a cup of coffee and: A road that ends nothing instead of a road to nowhere.

Forche also creates paradoxical lines that force us to think philosophically: (e.g.: A memory through which one hasn’t lived/A past to come/A search without hope for hope/ Happiness without fulfillment.

Furthermore, throughout “On Earth,” Forche calls attention to the act of writing itself as a way to find meaning out of random occurrences on this earth.
Under the microscope of a poem, she examines: A random life caught in a net of purpose. The writer acts as a historian, protector of the past who records moments so that we cannot forget: (e.g.: A record keeper of human and earthly life/And writing, the guardian of the past), but even the pen has its limits; language can only capture so much: (e.g.: At the point where language stops/At writing’s border. As a writer herself, Forche recognizes the benefits, but also the curse of being a writer: In solitary reverie we can tell ourselves everything/it is more ominous to see the world as it is. Her poem captures how powerful letters, and abecedarians can convey both the splendor and the dread of corporeal being.

Finally, note how Forche mixes in French phrases to call attention to particular themes: (e.g.: l’heure bleu (the blue hour), Ce voyage, je voulais le refaire) (This trip, I would like to redo it). The blue hour is breast-feeding time in the early morning, a time of quiet and innocence. The second phrase highlights regret, wanting to relive your life over. I am fluent in French, so translation was not a problem, however, for the average reader, Forche makes you work to figure our her poems. Joshua Marie Wilkinson reinforces this belief in “On Poetry & Accessibility,” when he says, “perhaps it is not the goal of a work of art to make its audience feel at home.” Part of the burden and the adventure of reading a poem are analyzing it. While the masses typically want accessibility, “a bright, curious reader is a gift,” Wilkinson says. Reading a poem is like a patient, compromising relationship, “what you get from the poem is precisely what you give to it.”

[Word Count: 617]

Sources:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/pr...
http://www.thevolta.org/ewc27-jmwilki...
“On Earth” in Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The difficulty of giving a book a rating goes without saying, but Forché's Blue Hour presents an extra challenge; the volume only collects 11 poems, including a 47-page abecedarium. How to rate a book with any precision when ¾ of it are dedicated to a single piece? I doubt there is a way.

All the same I enjoyed this book and want to rate it well. I think it finds Forché returning to a more lyric sensibility than in the volumes immediately before it, and I think her political project benefits from that return. Unlike the explicitly political poems you might find in The Angel of History, for example, (I'm relying on memory here, not having the book abroad with me) the political appears as fragments of the whole. The result reminds me of the successes of Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," where from the midst of what seems gibberish occasionally surfaces a clear bell-note of a political statement that reverberates all the more deeply in the context of a thirty page work resisting traditional sense-making. This is not to say that Forché's "On Earth," is gibberish in any fashion, or any other poem in the book. But the broader context of the writing project, the varied and fluxuating imagery, the lyric apparatus, all work to nurture and sometimes foreground the political statements that emerge. "On Earth," in particular, lures the reader into the comfort of form with its abecedarian progression and seemingly disassociated lines, so that when a radical image or statement arrives, it jars the reader to greater effect. As such, the poem pursues its mission on multiple strata, as any close reading of, say, "The Colonel," should also reveal.

Perhaps this is a more direct testament, though: I've already written a response to "On Earth," and I intend to read the poem again, all 47 pages of it, sometime in the next day or two.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The notes at the end of the book are very helpful. I am always looking for context. The abecedarium poem "On Earth" is a fascinating form which remains meaningful and engages the imagination with the use of words.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one of those books that makes me worry that I don't actually like poetry. Forché gives me a line or three per page that really strike me, but I would have to work harder than I apparently want to in order to understand what she is talking about beyond the fact that she has known someone(s?) who died. She plays with the boundary between comprehensible description of reality and abstract imagery, and her transitions between the two are so frequent and seamless that I find it pretty hard to follow. I am not sure whether I envy her confidence in writing a book that expects such a commitment of energy from the reader.

[Laurel Perez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection was not at all what I thought it might be, it was better in many ways. The first few poems were lovely, and I found myself ruminating over lines here & there that were especially provocative. However, what really takes the cake is the 47 page poem "On Earth" which sounds like an environmental diatribe, but oh no no, it is not. It is a close look at humanity. The hymn quality and the alphabetical stringencies of the form make this poem even more fantastic and epic in proportion. Thus form allowed for a rhythm that carried the content perfectly. I constantly found myself pausing to take notes, or to allow certain lines or stanzas to seep in. What a killer work.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is unlike anything I've ever read. The 45-page, gnostic-abcederian "On Earth" is haunting and masterful. This is a list at its best and most forceful. As certain motifs and words reappeared, a tension arose for me between witnessing and repeating. Such recording, of course, is essential, but devastating. Certain of Forche's lines helped me read her: “a random life caught in a net of purpose” (16); “as any new act inflicts its repetition” (32); “as the fence has recorded the wind” (33); “spoken in unknown words of a known language” (54).

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The form of this book blows my mind. Very imagistic, complicated, and above all, accomplished... Forche has quickly become one of my favorite poets since I started writing poetry seriously. "The Country Between Us" is incredible, but this one offers something equally inspiring on a completely different level.

[Myron · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does one approach death? the same way one approaches life, I guess. Question after Question to see that what isn't is. I recommend Carolyn Forche's BLUE HOUR to anyone who has lost anything, who has seen or felt the spirit of the deceased or another world. This book of poetry is other-worldly and human with suffering. And the Abecedarian "On Earth" is to die for; pun intended;)

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book of poetry by Carolyn Forche. I found it at my local library and it contains the poems and writings Carolyn was working on when she passed.

I found some of the poems had almost a mystical quality to them, hauntingly sad & melodic.

This was my first book of poetry I have read by Carolyn Forche - I will probably try to get more books by her in the future.

[Mirinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful, unflinching, mystical, sensual, repetitive, tenacious, and alphabetized litany of meditations on the hour before dawn, when the mind is said to apprehend the "radiance of its true nature." A stenography of collective unconscious. Lots of good quotations, too, referenced in the end notes.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars full and brimming over. cannot say enough about it. too good to say anything really. i am in awe. this is perhaps best poetry i have read in my entire life. and she is an amazing woman. i will say no more.

[Emily Shearer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The abécédaire that forms the second half is a list of beautiful lines, but I couldn't wrangle the threads together. She's trying to tell a story though drifting images linked together. After all, isn't that what we're all doing? What is the poetry of our lives about??

[Celeste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longer prose poems than in the COUNTRY BETWEEN US. Enjoying the change in poetic structure. Her voice is edgy, image-specific, no "poetiky" gunk. Good voice.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I have to listen to Carolyn Forche read again I will blow things out of my sinuses in squealishly blue bits.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seems very like Dickinson, subdued, yet also Whitmanesque--especially the long poem "On Earth." Fabulous book.

[Stacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Carolyn Forche. She is a wonderful poet. This book is another example of her talent.