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 this knowledge, a poem such as "Return" is rhetorical; its four pages could exist for the final section alone, and is nearly saved by an excellent ending. But it proves that she, too, can get caught up in lists of flat description….

What Forche, for the most part, remembers, what too many other political poets have forgotten, is that poetry's ultimate aim is transformation. And that transformation is, by its very nature, subtle. The finest poem is the one which closes this first section, "Because One Is Always Forgotten." Here, the political, the repugnant, becomes heightened lyricism….

"The Visitor," describing the man in prison dreaming of his wife, ends "There is nothing one man will not do to another." And on the following page, "The Colonel," a prose poem which can't help but be read as surrealistic, ends with the colonel pouring a sack of human ears on the table and flaunting them before his guests. This image of man as standing for cruelty and torture (a simplistic sensibility which would annoy me were it not for the fact that the poems themselves rise above it) is strongest in "Joseph," a poem for a childhood boyfriend who has returned from the Vietnam War fascinated by it and cherishing its memories….

In "As Children Together," one of the strongest poems, Forche can speak of childhood innocence without any trace of pretense…. The poem ends, two pages later, after describing Victoria's useless, trapped life with the husband mentally broken by the Vietnam War….

By carrying over such images, the identification with friends and relatives at home echoes the attempt to identify with the people of El Salvador, lending a harshness, an urgency, and a sense of failure to the autobiographical poems. At the same time, it gives a calmness and a sense of lifelong continuance to the poems in the first section….

Her craft, or a better word would be refinement, is most evident in Part II. One cannot help but think of Philip Levine's work: there is the same long, rambling and semi-conversational poem built around a few carefully chosen images, using the images to convey their final message—….

To read only the poems in Part II, we would be reminded of the best University of Iowa graduates: a poetry extremely well-crafted, revealing a fashionable amount about the author, always promising to do more than it does but, in the final analysis, safe. And yet this same craft is at work in the first section as well, and it is precisely what keeps the poems above the level of rhetoric. Added to this, there is Forche's astute sense of observation, and a tendency to describe things in a way slightly out of the ordinary, so that our heads turn sharply around to look.