Full Description
Carolyn Forché is one of America's most important contemporary poets - renowned as a 'poet of witness' - as well as an indefatigable human rights activist. Over four decades, she has crafted visionary work that has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, enquiries and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. In the Lateness of the World is a dark book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché imagines a place where 'you could see everything at once... every moment you have lived or place you have been'. 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. Her meditative poetry has a majestic sweep, with themes ranging from life on earth and human existence to history, war, genocide and the Holocaust. In the Lateness of the World is her first new collection in seventeen years, and follows three other collections published by Bloodaxe in Britain, The Country Between Us (1981/2018), The Angel of History (1994) and Blue Hour (2003). Jane Miller called Blue Hour 'a masterwork for the 21st century'. According to Joyce Carol Oates (New York Times Book Review), Forché's ability to wed the "political" with the "personal" places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine and Denise Levertov.
Contents
15 Museum of Stones
16 The Boatman
17 Water Crisis
18 Report from an Island
19 The Last Puppet
21 The Lightkeeper
22 The Crossing
23 Exile
24 Fisherman
25 For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo
26 The Lost Suitcase
28 Last Bridge
30 Elegy for an Unknown Poet
32 Letter to a City Under Siege
33 Travel Papers
38 The Refuge of Art
40 A Room
45 The Ghost of Heaven
48 Ashes to Guazapa
49 Hue: From a Notebook
50 Morning on the Island
51 A Bridge
52 The End of Something
53 Early Life
54 Tapestry
55 Visitation
56 In Time of War
57 Lost Poem
58 Charmolypi
59 Souffrance
60 Sanctuary
61 Uninhabited
62 Clouds
63 Passage
64 Light of Sleep
65 Theologos
67 Mourning
68 Transport
69 Early Confession
70 Toward the End
72 What Comes
75 Dedications and notes
76 Acknowledgements
