Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Forché, Carolyn (Vol. 25) - Rochelle Ratner

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page
4. Tweet This

ROCHELLE RATNER

In her recent book of essays, Light Up the Cave, Denise Levertov speaks of the need, in the 1960s, to create a new form for political poetry since, in the past, it had been narrative and epic in nature, and those forms were no longer viable. It is fitting, then, that Levertov says of this collection by Carolyn Forche:

Here's a poet who's doing what I want to do … she is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political, lyrical and engaged.

Uncommon as blurbs go, there could be no better way to describe The Country Between Us. What is crucial here is that it took a poet of the next generation, a decade after the furor of the Vietnam War, to achieve what Levertov, among others, had been aiming for….

Forche has learned she does not have to list the horrors over and over if she can find a few well-chosen incidents which speak for much more than themselves. Despite...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

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