That Carolyn Forche is this country's great poet is an undisputable fact. With every new book of poems, from "Gathering the Tribes" to "The Country Between Us" to "Angel of History" and now with "Blue Hour" Forche has discovered and investigated a new territory in American poetry-- a new territory which no one before her has examined with such power, force, precision and beauty. Critics call her a Poet of Witness, focusing on the part of her work which deals with worldly affairs-- and for a good reason, for so many of her poems, such as "The Morning Baking" a beautiful invocation to her grandmother from the earliest book to "The Colonel", a brilliant first hand account of experiencing atrocity in her second book, to "The Garden Shukkei-en" a magical elegy for the victims of Hirosima, to mention just a few pieces, have long became contemporary classics of that genre. But what most critics fail to mention and what is now so striking and undeniable in Forche's "Blue Hour" is the fact that Forche has for so many years been writing America's most powerful poetry of the spirit, poetry of--to borrow her own line--"in the silence surrounding what happened to us / It is the bell to awaken God that we've heard ringing." So why did our critics have to pigeon-hole this remarkable poet of the spirit as Political Poet and only see her in that light? I do not know the answer to this question. But I do know that the past century's three or four most wonderful poets of sublime, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes, Osip Mandelshtam-- were all once seen as solely political. Having read Carolyn Forche's Blue Hour, I have no hesitation in placing her name next to theirs. And what a magical book Blue Hour is! The book's central poem, On Earth, which is truly the first great poem of the 21st century, is the hymnal recitation of moments, which one after another restore the picture of human existence. Composed in alphabetical order, the lines of this poem, at first seemingly out of place from each other, rhythmically fall into the music of expectation making the reader turn page after page, filled with elegy and praise ("song of abundance psalms of grief"), this visionary accounts of passages from one life to next, it is the poetry of witness, yes: witness of the sublime, the "visible invisible". So the words on the page become moments that allow us to see "a door standing not now where once it stood / we are so made that nothing contents us" And so, from moment to moment, we begin to understand:

Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the hungriest, a carcass of flies.
Take the polished stillness from a locked church, prayer notes left between stones.
Answer them and in your net hoist voices from the troubled hours.
Sleep only when the least among them sleeps, and then only until the birds.
Make the flat-bed truck your time and place. Make the least daily wage your value.
Language will rise then like language from the mouth of a still river. No one's mouth.
Bring night to your imagingings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.

Carolyn Forche's poetry is saturated with such an intense desire to move forward, & such forward impetus. This book is so different from her previous book of poems, The Angel of History. That was compact to such an extreme. Her poems looked like usual-sized poems, but the language felt so compressed by her genius in such ingenius ways. Here, the poems are sprawling, with an ambitious Whitman influence marked by long end-stopped lines. One of my favorite moments of the book is actually a John Cage quote, "Everything in the world has a spirit released by its sound." & of course this books incredible 40+ page poem, On Earth, about what the mind experiences in the moments preceeding death. The introduction part of the poem ends "open the book of what happened". After that, for the the whole 40+pages of it, the lines are all in alphabetical order. & they're each incredibly, beautifully brilliant. A masterwork for the 21st century, yes. The feeling of speed beneath all of her poems is accentuated among other places in the lack of capital letters in any of her poetry, as if even after periods the language is part of the same rushing sentence. & her language otherwise too is very resourceful. Very resourceful, so many very deliberate & wholly unique coices in every bit of its promethean syntax.

Allow me to post the final poem of the book, in which her exacting, huge brilliance is in full force (as always...) & means so much to me as a poet & person. One of her few very short poems, it's hanging on my wall.

Afterdeath

...

Forche's second book, THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US, elicited almost Pharisitical envy, a reaction that betrayed just how truncated and isolationist the aesthetics of American poetry had become. Her third book, ANGEL OF HISTORY is arguably THE WASTE LAND of the second half of the twentieth century. Never a mere rhetoritician of the political, Forche sets the pace for her generation of poets in her fourth book, demonstrating once again a fearless innovation of content and form. Carolyn Forche's fourth book, BLUE HOUR: POEMS, evokes that limnal state between the truth that is accessed in dreams and waking, when consciousness hovers in extreme receptivity between life and the death that is to come. Blue is the color of God in Orthodox iconography, the color, according to Maxim Gorky's grandmother, of her grandson's soul, and of the premonitory hour before dawn, with all of its connotations of enlightenment and illumination. It is in this new collection especially that one overhears the strains of a visionary's mystical apprehension, harvested from edge of extremity. In "On Earth," the forty-page abecederian hymn with its allusion to The Lord's Prayer ("Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"), Forche catalogs with photographic accuracy the life review of a soul neither able to go forward nor back, a consciousness suspended, as in a surgical theater, above the theater of human events, creating an elegiac commentary upon mankind's ability to create heaven on earth. Included in the volume are eight lyrics of startling beauty, as spectral and haunting as the body in x-rays, riddled with a light that either illuminates or casts a shadow upon our demise. I am reminded of those small and extremely heavy cones in Borges, made of a metal which does not exist in this world, images of divinity in certain religions in Tlon. These beautifully wrought shorter poems return the lyric to its specific gravity-epigrams of matter gleaned at the frontier of consciousness. In a culture where it would be easy for poetry to devolve into a merely anecdotal art, something on the order of California cuisine, Forche reminds us of Wallace Stevens' dictum: " Poetry is that which helps us live" or, as Adrianne Rich has said it: "Poetry is where the imagination's contraband physical and emotional imprintings are most concentrated, most portable." As such, we would do well to preserve in poetry that which is most essential to our humanity. In BLUE HOUR: POEMS, Forche restores poetry to its most sacred purpose and wholeness of being. For this alone, we should give thanks and applaud.

Bombastic, pretentious, and overblown. Also irrelevent.

On first reading I hated this book so much because I didn't understand Forché's departure from the narrative structure of her earlier books. But further rereadings show how necessary it is to break the narrative in a "restoration piece" as this book. The voice(s) fragmented as it/they may seem is/are what holds the book together. These utterances show how that the personal is always political without being partisan. Best of all, I love this book for the expansiveness of meaning and sense whenever it is reread. Forché may not be a prolific poet, but each book is a delicate project, and The Angel of History is probably her best and most delicate work.

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.

I'm so glad my mother tongue language is Arabic! I've read Darwish's books in Arabic, and they were 'uplifting', and truely goes into your heart. Poetry books are supposed to be the hardest to read, you just can't pass one page without fully getting the idea, or at least have a personal thought about it.
this book is a translation of Darwish's poems, and unfortunately, it did not catch that 'paradise' of their original language.
you can pick up the book, read it, and understand it, but you will not get the idea he is a top poet. but he is, very much he is.

still, i think alot of people should read it, if nothing more than to have a feel of the desperation of the Palestinians away from their homeland.