CAROLYN FORCHÉ’S FOURTH poetry collection, Blue Hour, appeared in 2003, and her readers have longed for the next ever since. It’s hard to imagine any poetry book worth a wait of 17 years. Forché’s new collection, In the Lateness of the World, is worth more.
As the title suggests, Forché explores a dying world—countries ravaged and erased by war, islands drowned in natural disasters, seas overflowing with garbage. The poems are both haunting and haunted, including the memories of a lost world and the corpses that remain.
Forché coined the term “poetry of witness.” Her witness here is not only characteristically unflinching but also a challenge to readers.
The first half of the book mostly grieves the world’s tragedies at large, but always with the particularity that gives her ghosts a pulse. Nearly every poem includes rapid lists of sharp images. Forché’s lists dizzy and overwhelm, effectively dropping us into warzones and forcing us to follow her through an apocalypse. In “A Room,” she articulates what this technique mirrors and means: “books chosen at random, as our moments are, / ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us / for an instant, here by chance and radiant with significance.”
The book’s second half is more personal, with many poems written for or in memory of friends. But all carry the weight (and often the context) of universal grief. In this half, we also see a shadowy hope. She offers no pithy explanations of pain nor promises of starting over. Rather, she gestures toward a redemption of what is broken—a resurrection with wounds. This hope is eschatological and most directly addressed in the book’s final poem, “What Comes,” which employs language of “not-yet.” She even closes the book with a charge to “open then to the coming of what comes.”
For three years, I have begun my literature class with the book’s first poem, “Museum of Stones,” written in memory of one of Forché’s friends who collected stones during his travels. I don’t reveal that backstory until my students have read the poem on their own. They often note that the poem feels like a tour through the world at its best and worst. Nearly all say that while they don’t understand why this poet is so interested in stones, the final lines make them feel a shared humanity passing through the moments and terrains she illuminates. These lines encapsulate the entire collection’s hope and effect, showing “all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk / with a hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become / a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred.”
Whitney Rio-Ross has a master's in religion and literature from Yale Divinity School. She teaches as an adjunct in Nashville, Tenn.
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