Foreword by Stanley Kunitz
63 pages
Published 1976
Read September 11
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
My main exposure to poetry is contemporary (published within the last ten years or so), with a definite lean toward SFF poetry. I want to expand my poetry education, so when someone I follow shared a poem from this book, it was a quick purchase.
I don’t have the education, or the vocabulary, to pinpoint the differences between 2020s poetry and 1970s poetry. Forché returns again and again to evergreen topics: family, ethnic heritage, displacement, childhood, trauma, loss, sexuality, the intimacy of food, the land. She unspools gorgeous images, and breathes out heartbreak like frost on a Michigan morning. Her poems are often lovely, delicate things, grounded unshakably in the Midwestern earth. Yet something about her cadence, perhaps, or her word choice, feels unfamiliar, the dialect of the past.
Inevitably, I’m reminded of the only other 1970s poetry collection I’ve read, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wild Angels — not that they have much in common, otherwise, beyond a similar ineffable resonance with their decade, and how they demand a slower reading pace, sounding out connections between lines: “Seventeen years of solitude is seventeen / years. Quiet.”
Another difference: in our age of poetry-as-memoir, of confessional CNF with line breaks, Forché’s well of third-person character studies feels oddly uncomfortable. There’s an edge of concern for a modern reader, a wincing Wait, you’re construing someone else’s story? Forché gravitates toward portraits of impoverished Indigenous folks, which adds an extra frisson of possible exploitation. Perhaps it isn’t necessarily unethical, no more so than writing fiction based on the people you meet, but it’s an adjustment.
The book finishes strong with the section titled “The Place That Is Feared I Inhabit,” especially the poem “Kalaloch.”
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