The Angel of History

by Carolyn Forché

Book Overview

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060925841
• ISBN13: 9780060925840
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The Angel of Poetry

Perhaps the Angel of History - witness to cruelty and misery, will join forces with the Angels of Poetry and, through a haunting mosaic of poetic beauty, will somehow discover an end to the horrible suffering and grief in our world. Evocative of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Angel of Poetry is a plea to keep memory alive, to keep speaking for the dead. Forche has given us a purpose - as both readers and writers of poetry - a truly sacred task.

almost cruelly intelligent modern poetry

This book is just so brilliant. The poems are all terseness, & their lyric integrity & elliptical masonry demand very close attention of the reader. This is avant-garde poetry written by the fists of genius.

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY IS NECESSARY

In the interstices of the times we are living in. A book of poetry like this demanded to be born, and Carolyn Forche was elected parent. Like all great art: political, personal. The epitome of intimacy provides the koan of the distance of being human. This may be the defining poetic book of the nineties, and the end of the century. It is certainly one of those books, and by a poet who doesn't cease to fulfill her "vocation" as poet with great humanity and dignity.

a genius

This book is the work of a genius which demands to be read and reread time and again. A heir to the tradition of Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes, Carolyn Forche is able to create a work that once read will never be forgotten. This is not just the major book -- this is the very best. If the Lord Almighty lives in our prayers, this poetry is precisely his own, clear speech. It is a crime not to read this book.

Brutal and Brainy--maybe the best poetry of the decade.

This book demands all the mental stamina, literacy, and spiritual powers of endurance, that a reader can offer. The images and fragmented narratives resonate immediately, but there is enough to keep you re-reading, finding new connections, for years. The century's worst atrocities: Hiroshima, the Holocaust, World Wars, are right next to the century's highest intellectual achievements: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin. If you get the references, if you understand the history--or even if you don't (Forche is that good)--The Angel of History will be transformative reading.