Carolyn Forche
Excerpt from
 

Sequestered Writing


 
Horses were turned loose in the child's sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow.
The way light fills the hand with light, november with graves, infancy with white.
White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls.
The way they withdrew from the child's body and spoke as if it were not there.

What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?
--With its no one without its I--
A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes?
Ours was a ghost who stole household goods. Nothing anyone would miss.
Supper plates. Apples. Barbed wire behind the house. What?

 


Carolyn Forché at Modern American Poetry

Carolyn Forché at Academy of American Poets


Tad Richards on Carolyn Forché

As poet, translator and anthologist, Carolyn Forche has become the poet of her generation most strongly identified with political protest, social conscience, and, in her own phrase,  "the poetry of witness."As such, she can be seen in the tradition of poets like Robert Bly and W.H. Auden, who filled similar roles for their generations. Also like Bly and Auden before her, Forche has always maintained her reputation as a poet, not a purveyor of agitprop. Though reviews of her books appear in political magazines almost as often as literary magazines, even in those reviews her aesthetics receive as much attention as her beliefs.


The Colonel

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