Witness and Participant: A Review of Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World
In The Lateness of the World
Carolyn Forché
Penguin Press
March 2020
ISBN: 978-0525560401
96 pages
REVIEWED BY MANDANA CHAFFA
In The Lateness of the World, Carolyn Forché’s much-anticipated new poetry collection—her first in a decade and a half—offers a subtle, seamless, and altogether stunning interplay between the poetic, the personal, and the politic. Forché’s “poetry of witness” lights the reader’s path through brilliant complexities of meaning, often in lean phrases that astonish with their power and demand repeated close readings via multiple lenses.
Throughout her diverse literary career, Forché has contemplated the essence of humanity—the shades of hope, fear, longing, love and despair it contains within its fragile shell—while simultaneously warning us of our responsibilities to each other. This is artistry with a purpose. As a poet, she distills meaning to heady, supple words that entreat action and underscore that what we owe most to the world are our voices and our open hearts. Consider this excerpt from “The Ghost of Heaven”:
“If they capture you, talk.
Talk. Please, yes.
You heard me the first time.
You will be asked who you are.
Eventually, we are all asked who we are.
All who come
All who come into the world
All who come into the world are sent.
Open your curtain of spirit.”
Forché’s mastery of language, syntax, and sonic patterns renders us both witness and participant. In “Elegy For An Unknown Poet,” the narrator addresses an unidentified—and thus universal—you:
“You are the one watching, the one dreaming this, the homeless one left
behind.
The soul has departed. Thinking, alone with your thoughts,
the poverty of waking life, here where it nears the eternal.
[…]
Last summer I went with you to the crematorium.
We said poems and covered your body with gloves and roses.
I know that you are dead. Why do you ask and ask what can be done?
[…]
What is left us then but darkness? Oneself is always dark and near.”
Forché uses form to reflect how categorizations—humankind’s inadequate efforts to manage and understand the world—can never reflect all a life may contain, or become. In “Light of Sleep,” the abecedarian list from books such as The Encyclopedia of Ephemera denotes papers as diverse as “aerial leaflets,” “execution broadsides ‘liberally spattered with errors of all kinds’ sold by vendors at public hangings,” “gift coupons,” “lighthouse dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,” “slave papers,” “songbooks,” and even “the zoetrope disk.”
Via such list making, Forché acknowledges the need for methods to structure the unruly mass of information in our collective lives and equally, the impossibility of doing so. The result is an assortment of errata curiously juxtaposed, which still cannot—will never—encompass the entirety of the human experience.
Throughout the book, Forché underscores the role of poets to awaken, to elevate, to combat, and to keep narratives alive, especially for the most vulnerable in our midst. In “The Boatman,” Forché speaks specifically of Syrian refugees, though it’s difficult not to consider her subject all those throughout history who are forced to move, not toward a final destination, but from, eternally from. The shifting pronouns again place us in the role of all the participants in this story—in history—so that we are marked by what we ignore, what we are complicit in, and what we choose to forget. Again, in the end, it is the poet who commits to the necessary task of witnessing, of steering the nameless voices and delivering stories that might otherwise be “eaten by the sea.”
“… Leave yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend. I will get you there.”
Forché explores time as a moveable construct and it is fitting that these poems feel eternal; they are modern yet expressly not of a certain era, speaking to the experiences of our ancestors and our progeny. The subject matter is often dark, as our world is dark, but the language is always graceful, spare, and impeccably impactful, such as the closing lines of “In Time of War”:
“…and no one saw
a woman carrying the severed head,
but there were children standing on their own
graves and there was the distant rumble of cannon.”
A number of these poems are elegies or odes to other poets, and they are in the epic tradition, with Forché as traveling orator who enables them to live on. In doing so, Forché has further cemented her own place in this canon, as someone who witnesses, who declaims, who adds a vital verse to the stories of our humanity, in all its beauty and despair. She writes: "I am your translator. Pity me." But the overwhelming emotion is one of wonder as to the never-ending cycle of our conflicted histories, as well as the eternal power of naming and remembering to ensure that the human story endures.
As a poet-seer, many of Forché’s poems are sharply prophetic. In “Letter to a City Under Siege,” the narrator, reading “pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city,” details many horrors that will speak deeply to all readers in our own time of siege, such as “children who make bulletproof vests out of cardboard” and cemeteries “where violets grew in your childhood.” And yet in this poem, as in others, there are always signs of hope, the way daffodils may sprout in late winter.
“…Even the clocks have run out of time.
But, my good friend, the tunnel! There is still a tunnel for oranges.”
These poems reside in the liminal space between life and death, as well as between lifetimes, a vantage point from which temporality doesn’t flow in only one direction. The sweep of history and humanity in all its shadow and light is in every piece, which in the last lines of the collection are “open then to the coming of what comes”. With precise and striking language, Carolyn Forché’s return to poetry is masterful and welcome as we navigate our own world in all its lateness.
Carolyn Forché (@carolynforche) is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
Mandana Chaffa (@recycledgiraffe) is the founder of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters that will launch later this year. Her essay “1,916 Days” is in My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, (University of Texas Press 2020) and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Ploughshares blog, Rain Taxi, The Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Jacket2 and elsewhere. Born in Tehran, Iran, Mandana lives in New York.