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In the Lateness of the World: Poems
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER
“An undisputed literary event.” —NPR
“History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World . . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.
Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER
“An undisputed literary event.” —NPR
“History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World . . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.
Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
96 pages, Paperback
First published March 10, 2020
106 people are currently reading
2412 people want to read
About the author
Carolyn Forché
60 books404 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 146 reviews
December 14, 2019
Like many readers of poetry, I fist encountered Forché's work in the early 80s, when she'd returned from El Salvador and was trying to draw U.S. attention to events in that country and our role in them. I've been reading her since then and deeply respect her commitment to a poetry that is effective in terms of both artistry and purposefulness. I keep Poetry of Witness, which she co-edited, by my bedside for falling-asleep reading. (Not that it puts me to sleep—just that I like giving myself over to it in my final waking moments of the day.)
Forché, as always, provides witness in In the Lateness of the World. The settings of her poems are geographically diverse. They often focus on individual lives or a shared experience. In the afterword, she describes many of them as having been written for specific individuals, often deceased. These are poems that explore the value and vulnerabilities of human life.
My main frustration in reading was trying to fill out the back stories in these poems. Who were they for? What were their settings? Forché immersed me in the feelings of experience, but many of those experiences remained opaque. These poems offer specificity, but also demand that readers come to terms with uncertainty, which is certainly appropriate, given their focus. I often found myself wishing I was encountering these poems at a reading, accompanied by the sorts of small transitional stories a poet shares between pieces, but, ultimately, I'm glad the Forché demanded that I bring my own meaning to them.
Forché, as always, provides witness in In the Lateness of the World. The settings of her poems are geographically diverse. They often focus on individual lives or a shared experience. In the afterword, she describes many of them as having been written for specific individuals, often deceased. These are poems that explore the value and vulnerabilities of human life.
My main frustration in reading was trying to fill out the back stories in these poems. Who were they for? What were their settings? Forché immersed me in the feelings of experience, but many of those experiences remained opaque. These poems offer specificity, but also demand that readers come to terms with uncertainty, which is certainly appropriate, given their focus. I often found myself wishing I was encountering these poems at a reading, accompanied by the sorts of small transitional stories a poet shares between pieces, but, ultimately, I'm glad the Forché demanded that I bring my own meaning to them.
January 23, 2022
There is no album for these, no white script on black
paper, no dates stamped in a border, no sleeve, no fire,
no one has written on the back from left to right.
Haunting verses, designed to torment our collective indifference. These poems induce guilt. There’s historical longing, a ventriloquism for the mass grave and the conquered tribes. I appreciated the attention to flora. The knowing nod that climate is akimbo and the consequences are evident.
I was unaware of this poet until last week. I will certainly explore her work further.
paper, no dates stamped in a border, no sleeve, no fire,
no one has written on the back from left to right.
Haunting verses, designed to torment our collective indifference. These poems induce guilt. There’s historical longing, a ventriloquism for the mass grave and the conquered tribes. I appreciated the attention to flora. The knowing nod that climate is akimbo and the consequences are evident.
I was unaware of this poet until last week. I will certainly explore her work further.
April 3, 2023
"You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see you that you arrive safely, my friend. I will get you there."
- From The Boatman
Read on the heels of Forche's stunning 2018 memoir, I could see slivers of her life's story in these poems. Stylistically, only a few are the "poetry of witness" style of her 1980s work, many here involve situational and artistic themes.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see you that you arrive safely, my friend. I will get you there."
- From The Boatman
Read on the heels of Forche's stunning 2018 memoir, I could see slivers of her life's story in these poems. Stylistically, only a few are the "poetry of witness" style of her 1980s work, many here involve situational and artistic themes.
April 21, 2020
I never knew ghosts until I starting losing things, people, places, innocences that were hardly noticed until gone. I think some lose these things early on, and they are the ones to listen to, the ones that see the ghosts and name them and set them free. Maybe that is what this poet does in her way, my ghosts, your ghosts, humanity’s ghosts. I am not talking about actual spirits, that some may see or hear, but of the metaphorical ghost that is more a feeling, a sense, a mist you can almost see, but that rises, always rising, when noticed or accepted.
I had such a sense of ghosts in these poems, and not much joy, which is not my usual type of poetry, I am always looking for redemption, transformation; and some of her best imagery is accompanied by her best sadness, our best sadness, our shames and abuses we heap onto the world, trash and war that makes refugees, and some are just tributes and goodbyes to the beloveds, lost.
This is my second book of poetry since the pandemic, and it served the purpose of opening the conversation about what we have lost. Who we have lost. The ghosts that will travel with us for a while until they can’t or just aren’t any more. I think we need space for these ghosts and those of us who also know that can’t be the only ones, and these poems open other, if they allow it. Or they are just words.
We are living in the lateness of the world, my friends, and this poet vows as if speaking for the countless frontline workers but especially the ones holding the hands of our fellow humans dying alone: “I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.”
THE BOATMAN
Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here.
I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
REPORT FROM AN ISLAND
Sea washes the sands in a frill of salt and a yes sound. We lie beneath palms, under the star constellations of the global south: a cross, a sword pointing upward.
THE LIGHTKEEPER
A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks, darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life: the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
You say to me, Stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond, seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines, and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.
ELEGY FOR AN UNKNOWN POET
Listen: bells! You are sheltered once again in the stillness of childhood, where the slow river remains, rain singing from a gutter-spout, wet bottles, misted grillwork.
Apartness gathers the music of solitude as if it were a glass viola.
Bells ring that are and are not, and the soul is left wandering in the blue night.
LETTER TO A CITY UNDER SIEGE
Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city, reading the braille on its walls, walking beneath ghost chestnuts past fires that turn the bullet-shattered windows bronze, flaring an instant without warming the fallen houses where you sleep without water or light, a biscuit tin between you, or later in the café ruins, you discuss all night the burnt literature borrowed from a library where all books met with despair.
A ROOM
...books chosen at random, as our moments are, ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us for an instant, here by chance and radiant with significance.
HUE: FROM A NOTEBOOK
We went down the Perfume River by dragon boat as far as the pagoda of the three golden Buddhas. Pray here. You can ask for happiness. We light joss sticks, send votives downriver in paper sacks, then have trouble disembarking from the boat. Our bodies disembark, but our souls remain.
These soldiers are decades from war now: pewter-haired, steel-haired, a moon caught in plumeria. We are like the clouds that pass and pass. What does it matter then if we are not the same as clouds?
CHARMOLYPI
It begins with a word as small as the cry of Athena’s owl. An ache in the cage of breath, as when we say can hardly breathe. In sleep, we see our name on a stone, for instance. Or while walking in the rain among graves we feel watched. Others are still coming into our lives. They come, they go out. Some speak quietly beside us on the bench near where koi swim. At night, there is a light sound of wings brushing the walls. Not now is what it sounds like. Or two other words. But they are the same passerines as live in the stone eaves, as forage in the air toward night. To see them one must not be looking.
SOUFFRANCE
It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once. You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.
Or as you say now: there were many cities, but never a city twice.
SANCTUARY
Light pealed, bell-like, through the canopy. Long ago or seems so.
LIGHT OF SLEEP
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book, from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having to do with aerial leaflets...
...the zoetrope disk, also known as the wheel of life, wherein figures painted in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster, whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.
THEOLOGOS
For a third year, we are living on AERIA THASSOS, island of marble and pines, marble the quietest of stones, pines the first tree after a fire.
You may catch birds in nets, the first poet wrote, but you cannot in nets catch their songs.
Archilochus
MOURNING
fishermen setting their nets for mullet, as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines, whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces clear of night, putting the music out with morning light, and for the breadth of an hour it is possible to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember that there was no word for blue among the ancients, but there was the whirring sound before the oars of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world,
through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens, troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought— then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts, the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there: not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme, a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain
with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain, then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears in the writings of Herodotus: How the waves of the sea kiss the shore! For if the earth is a camp and the sea an ossuary of soul, light your signal fires wherever you find yourselves. Come the morning, launch your boats.
TOWARD THE END
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen ships, a year passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standing in the aftermath who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition, and then just like that—gone, and no one for hours, a sound you thought you heard
but in the waking darkness is not heard again, two sharp knocks on the door, death it was, you said, but now nothing, the islands, places you have been, the sea the uncertain, full of ghosts calling out, lost as they are, no one you knew in your life, the moon above the whole of it, like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and murk, you could see everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place you have been,without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would be one person again.
I had such a sense of ghosts in these poems, and not much joy, which is not my usual type of poetry, I am always looking for redemption, transformation; and some of her best imagery is accompanied by her best sadness, our best sadness, our shames and abuses we heap onto the world, trash and war that makes refugees, and some are just tributes and goodbyes to the beloveds, lost.
This is my second book of poetry since the pandemic, and it served the purpose of opening the conversation about what we have lost. Who we have lost. The ghosts that will travel with us for a while until they can’t or just aren’t any more. I think we need space for these ghosts and those of us who also know that can’t be the only ones, and these poems open other, if they allow it. Or they are just words.
We are living in the lateness of the world, my friends, and this poet vows as if speaking for the countless frontline workers but especially the ones holding the hands of our fellow humans dying alone: “I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.”
THE BOATMAN
Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here.
I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
REPORT FROM AN ISLAND
Sea washes the sands in a frill of salt and a yes sound. We lie beneath palms, under the star constellations of the global south: a cross, a sword pointing upward.
THE LIGHTKEEPER
A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks, darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life: the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
You say to me, Stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond, seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines, and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.
ELEGY FOR AN UNKNOWN POET
Listen: bells! You are sheltered once again in the stillness of childhood, where the slow river remains, rain singing from a gutter-spout, wet bottles, misted grillwork.
Apartness gathers the music of solitude as if it were a glass viola.
Bells ring that are and are not, and the soul is left wandering in the blue night.
LETTER TO A CITY UNDER SIEGE
Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city, reading the braille on its walls, walking beneath ghost chestnuts past fires that turn the bullet-shattered windows bronze, flaring an instant without warming the fallen houses where you sleep without water or light, a biscuit tin between you, or later in the café ruins, you discuss all night the burnt literature borrowed from a library where all books met with despair.
A ROOM
...books chosen at random, as our moments are, ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us for an instant, here by chance and radiant with significance.
HUE: FROM A NOTEBOOK
We went down the Perfume River by dragon boat as far as the pagoda of the three golden Buddhas. Pray here. You can ask for happiness. We light joss sticks, send votives downriver in paper sacks, then have trouble disembarking from the boat. Our bodies disembark, but our souls remain.
These soldiers are decades from war now: pewter-haired, steel-haired, a moon caught in plumeria. We are like the clouds that pass and pass. What does it matter then if we are not the same as clouds?
CHARMOLYPI
It begins with a word as small as the cry of Athena’s owl. An ache in the cage of breath, as when we say can hardly breathe. In sleep, we see our name on a stone, for instance. Or while walking in the rain among graves we feel watched. Others are still coming into our lives. They come, they go out. Some speak quietly beside us on the bench near where koi swim. At night, there is a light sound of wings brushing the walls. Not now is what it sounds like. Or two other words. But they are the same passerines as live in the stone eaves, as forage in the air toward night. To see them one must not be looking.
SOUFFRANCE
It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once. You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.
Or as you say now: there were many cities, but never a city twice.
SANCTUARY
Light pealed, bell-like, through the canopy. Long ago or seems so.
LIGHT OF SLEEP
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book, from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having to do with aerial leaflets...
...the zoetrope disk, also known as the wheel of life, wherein figures painted in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster, whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.
THEOLOGOS
For a third year, we are living on AERIA THASSOS, island of marble and pines, marble the quietest of stones, pines the first tree after a fire.
You may catch birds in nets, the first poet wrote, but you cannot in nets catch their songs.
Archilochus
MOURNING
fishermen setting their nets for mullet, as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines, whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces clear of night, putting the music out with morning light, and for the breadth of an hour it is possible to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember that there was no word for blue among the ancients, but there was the whirring sound before the oars of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world,
through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens, troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought— then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts, the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there: not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme, a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain
with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain, then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears in the writings of Herodotus: How the waves of the sea kiss the shore! For if the earth is a camp and the sea an ossuary of soul, light your signal fires wherever you find yourselves. Come the morning, launch your boats.
TOWARD THE END
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen ships, a year passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone standing in the aftermath who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition, and then just like that—gone, and no one for hours, a sound you thought you heard
but in the waking darkness is not heard again, two sharp knocks on the door, death it was, you said, but now nothing, the islands, places you have been, the sea the uncertain, full of ghosts calling out, lost as they are, no one you knew in your life, the moon above the whole of it, like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and murk, you could see everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place you have been,without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would be one person again.
June 16, 2020
LIGHT OF SLEEP
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink
on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book,
from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence
to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having
to do with aerial leaflets, air raid papers,
bills of mortality, birth certificates and blotting papers,
child lost-and-found forms, donor cards, erratum slips,
execution broadsides “liberally spattered with errors of all kinds”
sold by vendors at public hangings, funeralia, with drawings
of skeletons digging graves and inviting us to accompany
the corpse of x to the church of y, gift coupons, greeting cards,
housekeeping accounts, ice papers to place in windows
for the delivery of blocks of ice, jury papers, keepsakes,
lighthouse dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,
marriage certificates, news bills, notices to quit, oaths, paper
dolls, plague papers, playing cards, quack advertisements,
ration papers, razor blade wrappers, reward posters,
slave papers, songbooks, tax stamps, touring maps,
union labels and vice cards left in telephone boxes,
warrants and watch papers used to keep the movements
of the pocket watches under repair free of dust,
wills and testaments, xerography, yearbooks, and the zoetrope
disk, also known as the wheel of life, wherein figures painted
in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster,
whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink
on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book,
from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence
to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having
to do with aerial leaflets, air raid papers,
bills of mortality, birth certificates and blotting papers,
child lost-and-found forms, donor cards, erratum slips,
execution broadsides “liberally spattered with errors of all kinds”
sold by vendors at public hangings, funeralia, with drawings
of skeletons digging graves and inviting us to accompany
the corpse of x to the church of y, gift coupons, greeting cards,
housekeeping accounts, ice papers to place in windows
for the delivery of blocks of ice, jury papers, keepsakes,
lighthouse dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,
marriage certificates, news bills, notices to quit, oaths, paper
dolls, plague papers, playing cards, quack advertisements,
ration papers, razor blade wrappers, reward posters,
slave papers, songbooks, tax stamps, touring maps,
union labels and vice cards left in telephone boxes,
warrants and watch papers used to keep the movements
of the pocket watches under repair free of dust,
wills and testaments, xerography, yearbooks, and the zoetrope
disk, also known as the wheel of life, wherein figures painted
in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster,
whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.
April 12, 2020
Outstanding!
Definitely one of those books I will reread and reread again. Mx. Forché is a poet who uses language as the Universe’s Muses intended.
Definitely one of those books I will reread and reread again. Mx. Forché is a poet who uses language as the Universe’s Muses intended.
November 24, 2020
I enjoyed most of the poems in this collection. My favorites included: (1) "The Lightkeeper" (because I've always been fascinated by lighthouses), (2) "The Crossing" (reminiscent of the voyages our ancestors made across the oceans), (3) "Travel Papers" (a Holocaust poem), (4) "Exile" (another one with historical focus), (5) "Fisherman" (very Jewish tone), and (6) "The Lost Suitcase" (which, of course, was filled with books). I also enjoyed seeing how many sources of stones she found in "Museum of Stones." While many of her poems featured long lines, a few seemed to offer shorter ones--a preferred style for me. The careful word selection creates beautiful portraits for readers.
August 30, 2022
Ah, at last, a well-deserved Pulitzer finalist. This collection of poems had a great substantiative quality to it. A contemplation of war, of historical facts as they echo throughout time. Such strong emotionally challenging poems.
Mind you, I’m not a typical poetry reader, I dabble at best, but this dabbler was impressed by this book. So much poetry comes across as skimpy appetizers, teasers, tapas, but this collection was definitely a procession of main courses. As such – heavy, satisfying, complete. Very well done. Recommended.
Mind you, I’m not a typical poetry reader, I dabble at best, but this dabbler was impressed by this book. So much poetry comes across as skimpy appetizers, teasers, tapas, but this collection was definitely a procession of main courses. As such – heavy, satisfying, complete. Very well done. Recommended.
April 10, 2020
Another stunning book by the incomparable, Carolyn Forché. This work is prophetic, lush with detail, and full of lessons that measure the reader against a new sense of moralia in a larger worldview than most of us ever get to witness.
April 20, 2020
Elegiac. All loss is a memory. These poems count the losses. The first one is especially powerful.
October 17, 2021
I got this one at the library, and I had to return it before writing a review. So I lack examples. That said, my general impression was that this was Forchés best collection. In the past I've enjoyed her collections well enough, but there was always something about the globe-trotting passionate poet-of-witness that I found annoying. She's not affected in any way, she has a big heart, but it always seemed to me that her passion outran the poetry. In "In the Lateness of the World" that is not case. There is restraint, control, beauty, and profound depth. Forchés entire career has been moving toward this point. And she has found it. I want to get my own hard bound copy, because this is a collection I will return to again and again.
May 3, 2021
Remarkable. Beautiful poetry. She is known for writing poetry of conscience. Many of these poems are dedicated to other poets, living and dead. These dedications help the reader locate the poem - where it is set, who it is about. The Ghost of Heaven and Ashes to Guazapaare dedicated to her great friend Leonel Gomez, 1930-2009 who talked her into going to El Salvador during their civil war in the 1970's. One of my favorites was Uninhabited , a poem about ghosts among us.
October 11, 2025
The best of Forché's poems read like roadside markers alerting the attentive traveler that once there was a beautiful object (now smashed), a beautiful city (now blasted), a human being (dead now in a coffin) who was here. Gone forever, but worth remembering. The worst of it reads like sentimental journalism rephrasing news headlines into lists of nouns. I like her ideas better than her images and I wish that she had any sense of sound, but I care enough about her vision to be pretty disappointed that it isn't better executed.
My favorite was easily "Toward the End"
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen ships, a year
passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone in the aftermath
who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition,
and then just like that—gone, and no one for hours, a sound you thought you heard
but in the waking darkness is not heard again, two sharp knocks on the door, death
it was, you said, but now nothing, the islands, places you have been, the sea
the uncertain,
full of ghosts crying out, lost as they are, no one you knew in your life, the moon above
the whole of it, like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air
where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered
to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and murk, you could see
everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place you have been,
without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would be one person again.
My favorite was easily "Toward the End"
In this archipelago of thought a fog descends, horns of ships to unseen ships, a year
passing overhead, the cry of a year not knowing where, someone in the aftermath
who once you knew, the one you were then, a little frisson of recognition,
and then just like that—gone, and no one for hours, a sound you thought you heard
but in the waking darkness is not heard again, two sharp knocks on the door, death
it was, you said, but now nothing, the islands, places you have been, the sea
the uncertain,
full of ghosts crying out, lost as they are, no one you knew in your life, the moon above
the whole of it, like the light at the bottom of a well opening in iced air
where you have gone under and come back, light, no longer tethered
to your own past, and were it not for the weather of trance, of haze and murk, you could see
everything at once: all the islands, every moment you have lived or place you have been,
without confusion or bafflement, and you would be one person. You would be one person again.
April 9, 2020
Haunting, timely lamentations in life, memories, and all we grieve.
June 5, 2020
Perceptive poems about the current events of our time and the current state of humanity emanating from those events. Some of these poems are astonishingly beautiful: "Mourning" and "The Boatman."
April 1, 2020
I had an odd experience reading Forché's most recent volume. I read poetry for a half hour or so every morning, which means I generally spread a volume over four or five days. With In the Lateness of the World, I had "on" days when I was thoroughly in synch with the rhythms and images and "off" days when I just wasn't tuned in. Which means it's probably about me, not the words. At the same time, glancing back the poems I missed still didn't speak to me. Who knows?
Having said that, at about the 3/4 point--from "Charmolypi" on--it absolutely caught fire. Forché, just a bit older than I am, is clearly thinking about mortality, her own but more importantly about the commadres and compadres--political and poetic--she's known. The poems I'd start with include "A Room," "Morning on the Island," Light of Sleep," and "Transport." Then "The Last Puppet," "Last Bridge," "Souffrance," and "Sanctuary." I'm going to quote "Charmolypi" (which means Joyful Sorrow, the type of feeling you experience when thinking of a friend who's gone one) in full since for the moment it's taking up a lot of space in my psyche:
It begins with a word as small as the cry of Athena’s owl.
An ache in the cage of breath, as when we say can hardly breathe.
In sleep we see our name on a stone, for instance.
Or while walking in the rain among graves we feel watched.
Others arestill coming into our lives. They come they go out.
Some speak quietly beside us on the bench near where koi swim.
At night there is a light sound of wings brushing the walls.
Not now is what it sounds like. Or two other words.
But they are the same passerines as live in the stone eaves,
as forage in the air toward night. To see them one must not be looking.
Having said that, at about the 3/4 point--from "Charmolypi" on--it absolutely caught fire. Forché, just a bit older than I am, is clearly thinking about mortality, her own but more importantly about the commadres and compadres--political and poetic--she's known. The poems I'd start with include "A Room," "Morning on the Island," Light of Sleep," and "Transport." Then "The Last Puppet," "Last Bridge," "Souffrance," and "Sanctuary." I'm going to quote "Charmolypi" (which means Joyful Sorrow, the type of feeling you experience when thinking of a friend who's gone one) in full since for the moment it's taking up a lot of space in my psyche:
It begins with a word as small as the cry of Athena’s owl.
An ache in the cage of breath, as when we say can hardly breathe.
In sleep we see our name on a stone, for instance.
Or while walking in the rain among graves we feel watched.
Others arestill coming into our lives. They come they go out.
Some speak quietly beside us on the bench near where koi swim.
At night there is a light sound of wings brushing the walls.
Not now is what it sounds like. Or two other words.
But they are the same passerines as live in the stone eaves,
as forage in the air toward night. To see them one must not be looking.
April 28, 2020
I'm so happy to be reading this book on Carolyn Forché's 70th birthday! What an absolute treasure she is for the world of poetry. I finished her memoir WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE earlier this year and I hope you will run and read it! It is as beautiful as her poetry.
I loved reading this new collection, and it shines with all of Forché's best talents. We are so lucky to have a poet of witness during these times. Some of my favorite lines:
Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
Sea washes the sands in a frill of salt and a yes sound.
when you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.
Writing is older than glass but younger than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope.
Gone is your atlas of countries unmarked by war, absent your manual for the preservation of hours.
They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.
there were many cities, but never a city twice.
I loved reading this new collection, and it shines with all of Forché's best talents. We are so lucky to have a poet of witness during these times. Some of my favorite lines:
Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
Sea washes the sands in a frill of salt and a yes sound.
when you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.
Writing is older than glass but younger than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope.
Gone is your atlas of countries unmarked by war, absent your manual for the preservation of hours.
They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.
there were many cities, but never a city twice.
September 4, 2021
If I had the faintest clue as to what she was writing of, these poems would have been extraordinary. Her word choice, subtle imagery, construction, was enough to keep me reading despite not really comprehending what she was writing about. I felt like I was reading many beautiful sentences but couldn’t place a meaning except for a few poems that I vaguely connected with.
April 4, 2020
Stunning, beautiful, thought-provoking. Please read this. Easily one of the best books I have read this year.
May 2, 2020
Opening lines: ‘These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin’
December 20, 2021
I suppose we can't all love everything, and after loving the last three or four poetry collections I read, I assumed I would connect with every poetic thought and swish of pen.*
But like students in a classroom: sometimes they connect with you, sometimes they don't. And just because they didn't connect with you doesn't mean there isn't another teacher out there who will be exactly what they need.
So, don't skip this one on my account. But no: I found it tedious and unmoving.
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy a tidbit here and there:
"They began their stories when the war ended. Never when the war began."
-From "Early Life"
And if picking this up at the bookstore or library, "Uninhabited" on page 60 is worth a whispered read aloud. Perhaps that's cheating the author out of her due. Or maybe you thank the miner, and condemn all poets to starve.
The best (or my favorite, at least) was "Toward the End," on page 70. If I was determined to commit one poem to memory from this collection, it would be that one. If one poem should make it into an anthology, it should be that one.
*Click of a key, more likely.
But like students in a classroom: sometimes they connect with you, sometimes they don't. And just because they didn't connect with you doesn't mean there isn't another teacher out there who will be exactly what they need.
So, don't skip this one on my account. But no: I found it tedious and unmoving.
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy a tidbit here and there:
"They began their stories when the war ended. Never when the war began."
-From "Early Life"
And if picking this up at the bookstore or library, "Uninhabited" on page 60 is worth a whispered read aloud. Perhaps that's cheating the author out of her due. Or maybe you thank the miner, and condemn all poets to starve.
The best (or my favorite, at least) was "Toward the End," on page 70. If I was determined to commit one poem to memory from this collection, it would be that one. If one poem should make it into an anthology, it should be that one.
*Click of a key, more likely.
September 30, 2021
There are some real bright spots in this collection.
"Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,
a child herself with child,
for whom we searched
through here, or there, amidst
bones still sleeved and trousered,
a spine picked clean, a paint can,
a skull with hair."
However, for the most part I was not touched by the writing even when the subject matter was touching in itself. In fact, I often found myself thinking that there must have been more thought put into how the text should look on the page (i.e. things that convey "poetry" - weird spacing, odd line breaks, lack of capitalization, artificial pauses, run on sentences, etc.), lest we forget it is poetry, than was put into the words themselves.
Despite this, the bright spots are worth slogging through the rest.
"Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,
a child herself with child,
for whom we searched
through here, or there, amidst
bones still sleeved and trousered,
a spine picked clean, a paint can,
a skull with hair."
However, for the most part I was not touched by the writing even when the subject matter was touching in itself. In fact, I often found myself thinking that there must have been more thought put into how the text should look on the page (i.e. things that convey "poetry" - weird spacing, odd line breaks, lack of capitalization, artificial pauses, run on sentences, etc.), lest we forget it is poetry, than was put into the words themselves.
Despite this, the bright spots are worth slogging through the rest.
November 13, 2020
"girl walking toward you out of childhood / not yet herself, having not yet learned to recite / before others, and who would never wish to stand / on a lighted proscenium, even in a darkened house, / but would rather dig a hole in a field and cover herself / with barn wood, earth, and hay, to be as quiet as plums turning. / There is no calendar, no month, no locket, but your name / is called and called in the early storm. No one finds / you, no one ever finds you" (Tapestry, 54).
Forché manages to infuse such lightness into a work that grapples with death and war. Some of her images are phenomenal; some of her poems are a flood of words that must be reread to comprehend. I still prefer The Angel of History, but this collection of poems is undoubtedly significant in its own right.
Forché manages to infuse such lightness into a work that grapples with death and war. Some of her images are phenomenal; some of her poems are a flood of words that must be reread to comprehend. I still prefer The Angel of History, but this collection of poems is undoubtedly significant in its own right.
March 6, 2024
I was blown away by this collection. All her poems are intense, they hit hard, but they don’t wear you out. Many are sprinkled with unusual but pleasing words, such as “abattoir” — which I looked up and learned it means slaughterhouse. She is a champion at lists. Abattoir, is a final item on a list in Museum of Stones:
These are your stones…/ collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,/ battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir—/
Abattoir sounds much more pleasing than slaughterhouse!
I also admire her use of color:
from Elegy for an Unknown Poet
Black is the color of footsteps, frost, stillness, and tears./… Blue appears as a cloud, flower, ice./… A river is green, but green as well are flecks of decomposition. Silver, the blossoming/ poppies, a wind’s voice, faces of the unborn.
As a teacher, I read to my students the book I love you the purplest by Barbara M Joose, as a sample for writing about love using color. I wrote a sample poem myself in which I did a little of this with the color gray. The color of forgotten things…/The color of in between, the color of a question/with no right answer
Were I to teach this lesson again, I would encourage more thinking like Forchés, rather then having the students try to think of things that are always red, for example, which very few things are always only one color.
Do I wish I had written this collection? Yes because of her vocabulary and talent and no because I’m not her kind of thinker. My friends sometimes call me a Seinfeld poet. I can’t see some of her vocabulary in a Seinfeld poem or standup poem. Unless I were taking a close look at million dollar words. Would a standup poem ever be titled “Souffrance” or have in the name of”Hölderlin,” who, I gathered from the poem was or is a poet. Would a standup poem ever contain Aerie Thassos? Maybe. Maybe I will write one using some of Forché’s words without deciding anything about it until I finish.
These are your stones…/ collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,/ battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir—/
Abattoir sounds much more pleasing than slaughterhouse!
I also admire her use of color:
from Elegy for an Unknown Poet
Black is the color of footsteps, frost, stillness, and tears./… Blue appears as a cloud, flower, ice./… A river is green, but green as well are flecks of decomposition. Silver, the blossoming/ poppies, a wind’s voice, faces of the unborn.
As a teacher, I read to my students the book I love you the purplest by Barbara M Joose, as a sample for writing about love using color. I wrote a sample poem myself in which I did a little of this with the color gray. The color of forgotten things…/The color of in between, the color of a question/with no right answer
Were I to teach this lesson again, I would encourage more thinking like Forchés, rather then having the students try to think of things that are always red, for example, which very few things are always only one color.
Do I wish I had written this collection? Yes because of her vocabulary and talent and no because I’m not her kind of thinker. My friends sometimes call me a Seinfeld poet. I can’t see some of her vocabulary in a Seinfeld poem or standup poem. Unless I were taking a close look at million dollar words. Would a standup poem ever be titled “Souffrance” or have in the name of”Hölderlin,” who, I gathered from the poem was or is a poet. Would a standup poem ever contain Aerie Thassos? Maybe. Maybe I will write one using some of Forché’s words without deciding anything about it until I finish.
October 7, 2024
3.5 stars. Much of the collection simply didn't land for me - I will recommend particular poems, but not necessarily the whole work. Mourning, one of the last poems in the collection, was perhaps my favorite - Forché wrestles compellingly with the year-spanning yet ultimately inadequate power of poetry to structure our fundamentally isolated experience of space and time so that we can share a sense of history.
September 13, 2020
Lovely collection! I finished this like weeks ago and forgot to update so don't have anything specific to say. If you like Forche, you'll like this book!
August 17, 2021
woww i wasn’t expecting that, I really enjoyed this!
April 7, 2022
Some really fine lines in this dark piece of work. I came away feeling hopeless for a world that is destined to be apocalyptic sooner, rather than later.
December 26, 2025
This was an interesting collection. Sometimes I feel like jumping into reading a well-established poet with numerous books is like jumping into a conversation when it's getting on towards its end. That said, the ghostliness of the collection was nice. I really liked "Lost Poem," "Charmolypi," "Early Life," and "Ashes to Guazapa."
November 14, 2020
This is a beautiful collection of poems that are very accessible and written in a variety of impressive forms. I especially enjoyed the "list" poems.
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