Otherwhere

New & Selected Poems 1976–2026

AvCarolyn Forché

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

187 kr

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Beskrivning

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.'

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-10-22
Mått:156 x 234 x 19 mm
Vikt:463 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:240
Förlag:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
ISBN:9781780378183

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Poesi inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

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 drew 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 (Penguin, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2020). In the Lateness of the World was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2020 and a 2021 Pulitzer Finalist in Poetry. Her retrospective, Otherwhere: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2026) draws upon her five previous collections as well as new work. 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. As Visiting Professor at Newcastle University she 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. The anthology In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, co-edited by her with Ilya Kaminsky, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2023. Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991), Fernando Valverde's America (2021) and (with Lars Gustaf Andersson) The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg (2022).

Recensioner i media

The poignant cri de coeur of this singular work must affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time. Carolyn Forché makes a complex voice for all the mute victims of our destructive world as the killing goes on and the patterns of our lives continue our committed self-destruction. Hers is the heroism which still cares.