Full Description
Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand.
By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forché to return home, asking her to 'talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the military aid.' A week later he was assassinated (and is only now being made a saint). Back in the US, Forché gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of her second collection, poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma. When the book appeared in 1981, at a time when the conflict in El Salvador had finally forced its way into public awareness, it won her immediate recognition.
Briefly available in Britain from Jonathan Cape in the 1980s, it was reissued by Bloodaxe to coincide with the publication by Penguin of Carolyn Forché's long awaited memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (Penguin, 2018) followed by a new collection from Bloodaxe, In the Lateness of the World (2020).
The Country Between Us has sold tens of thousands of copies on the US, where it has never been out of print. It won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.
Contents
IN SALVADOR, 1978-80
11 San Onofre, California
12 The Island
15 The Memory of Elena
17 The Visitor
18 The Colonel
19 Return
23 Message
25 Because One Is Always Forgotten
REUNION
29 Endurance
31 Expatriate
33 Letter from Prague, 1968-78
35 Departure
36 Photograph of My Room
39 On Returning to Detroit
41 As Children Together
44 Joseph
47 Selective Service
48 For the Stranger
50 Reunion
52 City Walk-up, Winter 1969
54 Poem for Maya
OURSELVES OR NOTHING
52 Ourselves or Nothing
