Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Forché, Carolyn (Vol. 25) - Paul Gray

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PAUL GRAY

Carolyn Forché paid extended visits to El Salvador, working as a journalist and human rights advocate. She could not have known that land would be Topic A in the U.S. just at the time her second book appeared; thanks to that coincidence, though, some of the poems in The Country Between Us have the urgency of news bulletins…. (p. 83)

The brutalities visited on the helpless [in El Salvador] naturally arouse Forché's sympathy and anger. She makes pain palpable. Yet her accounts of antigovernment rebels are neither polemical nor romanticized: "It is not Che Guevara, this struggle." She addresses the guerrillas as friends but tells them what they do not want to hear…. [Forché's] is a bleak message, passionately stated. That description holds for the poems in this volume that are not about El Salvador; meditations on Viet Nam, Czechoslovakia, relatives, friends, lovers old and new…. What she has seen of the world so far has not made her a...

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1. Introduction
2. Stanley Kunitz
3. Wendy Knox
4. Kenneth Rexroth
5. Stanley Plumly
6. Claire Hahn
7. Paul Gray
8. Joyce Carol Oates
9. Katha Pollitt
10. Rochelle Ratner
11. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates