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 five 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. Her meditative poetry has a majestic sweep, with themes ranging from life on earth and human existence to history, war, genocide and the Holocaust. Her retrospective, Otherwhere, is published fifty years after her debut, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975. It includes selections from that book and from four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: The Country Between Us (1981/2019), The Angel of History (1994), Blue Hour (2003) and In the Lateness of the World (2021), and opens with If there is ink, a group of 16 new poems. 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. Jane Miller called Blue Hour ‘a masterwork for the 21st century’. Carolyn Forché's own selection from her books is prefaced with an introductory essay, Older Than Glass, Younger Than Music, in which she relates her life and times to her development as a poet and thinker, tracing the shifts in her poetry across her five collections. This concludes: 'What draws me to poetry is mystery, sensibility, and the hidden architecture of the poem, excavated in its making, and revealed in the tremor of its disclosure. When I’m truly writing, the poem takes me as close as possible to the precipice, and allows me to see, however obliquely, what the other has seen. Only the poem knows the route, tacking between temporal latitudes until the armada of impeding thoughts have been blown off course. We live in a sea of ambient language, speech that surrounds and is also within us: why not set it in motion to a music of its own? At least to honour what we experienced, from ancient times to the present? For words are not rubble, but mosaic chips of salvific time and radiant naming, fragments of intelligence however fleeting, random signifiers that, taken together, become the shrine of a poem, a holy place.'
