The Angel of History - Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry - Softcover

Carolyn Forché

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852243074 ISBN 13: 9781852243074

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, 1994

Synopsis

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

About this title

Review:

"The "Angel of History" is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half century of atrocities that has yet been written in English."-- Calvin Bedient, "The Threepenny Review""The poignant "cri de couer" of this singular work most affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time."-- Robert Creeley"I don't think I have ever come across a poem of such length that is nevertheless so beautifully transparent and haunting."-- James Merrill"A dark, richly textured, complicated work...["The Angel of History"] is that great rarity, an altogether new thing."-- Liz Rosenberg, "Boston Globe""Poetry of consummate beauty...reminiscent of Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'"-- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

About the Author:

Carolyn Forche is the author of Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award; The Country Between Us, which received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America; and The Angel of History, awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Centuly Poetry of Witness. Recently she was presented with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1852243074
• ISBN 13: 9781852243074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 98