Audre Lorde and Carolyn Forché are both gifted poets endowed with clarity of inward vision and a willingness and power to project it with often devastating impact. (p. 762)

Like Lorde, Forché writes poetry of pellucid honesty. She too explores the paradoxical freedom and constraint bestowed on her through the blood of her forbears. Her Slavic ancestors bequeathed her rituals of religion and husbandry, customs that were "sacred and eternal." But she presses always to know more, to understand the mystery behind the ritual….

The deepest harmonies Forché discovers [in her Gathering the Tribes] are with nature itself. The landscapes and people, not only of the Michigan farm of her childhood, but of New Mexico, British Columbia, and coastal Washington, provide images for her poetry. She writes with a profound sense of the beauty and threat in the rhythms of the seasons and her own bodily needs. Some of her most impressive poetry deals with sexual experience. Perhaps because Forché writes with such deceptive ease, these poems achieve an unadorned eloquence, a seeming inevitability of statement. But Forché is no romanticist; at the most intimate moment a lover can be the enemy…. The balanced insight she attains is hard-won, precarious. Her quiet insistence on looking simultaneously at the beautiful and the ugly makes her poetry complex; her technical skill makes it a disciplined art….

[Lorde and Forché] write with authority and intensity. They are artists who, without being "confessional" poets, are not afraid to come to terms with their full experience of life. The voice of American poetry is excitingly alive in their writing. (p. 763)