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The angel of history
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- The Angel of History bears witness to the moral disasters of our times: war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. The book is a meditation on memory - how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems are fragmented, discordant, reflecting the effects of such experience, but forming a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations we make to survive what is unsurvivable. It is divided into five sections dealing with the atrocities of war in France, Japan and Germany as well as Carolyn Forché's own experiences in Beirut and El Salvador. The title figure, the Angel of History - a figure imagined by Walter Benjamin - can record the miseries of humanity yet is unable either to prevent these miseries from happening or from suffering from the pain associated with them. Kevin Walker, in the Detroit Free Press, called the book 'a meditation on destruction, survival and memory'. Don Bogen, in The Nation, saw this as a logical development, since Forché's work with her poetry of witness anthology Against Forgetting was 'instrumental in moving her poetry beyond the politics of personal encounter. The Angel of History is rather an extended poetic mediation on the broader contexts - historical, aesthetic, philosophical - which include [the 20th]…century's atrocities,' wrote Bogen. And Steven Ratiner, reviewing the work for the Christian Science Monitor, called it one that 'addresses the terror and inhumanity that have become standard elements in the twentieth-century political landscape - and yet affirms as well the even greater reservoir of the human spirit'.
- About The Author
- Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, and has taught at several universities. She was Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a 'means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities'; and most recently, Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981; UK reissue from Bloodaxe, 2019), drew on her experiences in El Salvador before and during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2003), and In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, UK' Penguin Press, USA, 2020). Her landmark anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993), was followed by Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (Norton, 2014), edited with Duncan Wu. She is Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, and edited the anthology The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2017) with Jackie Kay. Her memoir What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (2019) was published by Penguin at the same time as Bloodaxe's UK reissue of her 1981 collection The Country Between Us, which covers the same period as the memoir. Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegrìa's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781852243074
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Bloodaxe Books, (27 October 1994)
- Number of Pages
- 84
- Weight
- 190 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 234 x 156 x 12 mm
- Categories: