the colonel

by Carolyn Forché

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

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

[Madison Green]

Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” was one of my favorite poems this week as I really admired the storytelling quality of the writing. The tension that Forché built throughout the story helped aid the intense feeling of the situation. Some of the sentences that exemplified this specifically were “There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him,” as well as, “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.” This poem does a great job of sentence and language placement, as the sentences with brutal descriptions usually come right after or before a seemingly normal sentence. For example, the “Broken bottles…” quote comes after “On the television was a cop show. It was in English,” and after, “We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid.” The domestic scene serves as a cozy and intimate setting that contrasts the feelings of danger and suffocation. I really enjoyed in the lecture, how you state, “the contrast with the wealth, the luxury of the rack of lamb, gold wine, and a gold bell….” I think it is a very powerful decision to include these descriptions of wealth because it makes it all the more intimidating knowing the money and status the perpetrators most likely have. Lastly, one of my favorite parts in this poem is the use of short and simple sentence structure throughout. Some of my favorite lines were, “I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night,” as well as, “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.” This kind of writing feels very blunt and to the point, making the situation feel more dire and impending. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this poem because it flowed very well and kept me interested the entire time.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the problem with many poems is that you need to know the background. This poem does not mean anything to me because I do not know who or what it is about. Having said that, I can still appreciate the violence within normal walls. And I like the last lines about the chopped off ears - "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."

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh the imagery was manifique in laying out her message. Carolyn cooked!