[In the excerpt below, Bedient offers a favorable assessment of The Angel of History.]

Carolyn Forché's The Angel of History is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically "inevitable" response to a half-century of atrocities that has yet been written in English. Each rereading becomes more hushed, more understanding, more painful, more rapt. A sort of bedrock of acquaintance with human misery, as of memory's capacity to witness it, emerges in lines that are each peculiarly forlorn: "The cry is cut from its stalk."

Forché creates—was given—a new tone, at once sensitive and bleak, a new rhythm, at once prose-like and exquisite, a new line and method of sequencing, at once fluid and fragmentary, frozen at the turn. Take the third unnumbered section of the title poem, which confronts the farmhouse in Izieu where forty-four Jewish children were "hidden April to April" during the war:

       Within the house, the silence of God. Forty-four bedrolls, forty-four metal cups.
       And the silence of God is God.
 
       In Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in Les Milles, Les Tourelles, Moussac and Aubagne,
 
                 the silence of God is God.
 
       The children were taken to Poland.
       The children were taken to Auschwitz in Poland
 
                      singing Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace
 
         
et la Lorraine.
       In a farmhouse still standing in Izieu, le silence de Dieu est Dieu.

Hypnotic, painfully ice-cold, the repetitions, the catalogue of place names (and they are beautiful: could God not have trusted speech in them?), the horridly mechanical primer's incremental creep from "to Poland" to "To Auschwitz in Poland," and Elie Wiesel's line on the inhuman purity of a silent God—these are part of an aesthetic which is unable to blame, explain, or console: a stunned aesthetic of bafflement, poised like an ear before "le silence de Dieu."

Forché is not concerned to connect up even related material closely and clearly; she is not mapping anything (except maybe silence). The gaps between her lines and sections count as much as the words, the artistry is half in the evocation of what cannot be retrieved from the ashes or forced from the silence. Exiled, displaced, ephemeral, cut off from the old dream of natural happiness, natural time, each line is an unfinished separation, an item in an infinite field of disappointment, forced into aimless drift, an untotalizable disaster implicit in it. The poet thus makes a small book huge. She earns her title.

Wallace Stevens's description of poetry, "particles of order, a single majesty," fits an earlier, a more naive kind of poetry than Forché's, whose "rage against chaos," in Stevens's words, is scarified into the angel of history's appalled witness of our times. Witness is not contemplation, it is far more passive; its goals are to see, tell, not forget, and withstand. Quick-pulsed, plangent activist in her famous book The Country Between Us, Forché is here encased in a giant block of ice, helpless, but no less compassionate for that. (The old voice starts up only once, in the most anonymous and jumbled of the long [sections], "The Recording Angel": "Each small act of defiance a force"). How do you reach out to "history"? To that which gives the lie to succession, to optimism? To that whose heart is extremity? The poet underwrites the pessimism of [Walter] Benjamin's sublime figure for history: "a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in [the angel's] wings with such violence that [he] can no longer close them. The storm … propels him [backward] into the future … while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

The Angel of History writes disaster. Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster is the best single guide to its assumptions, to the stone-hard equanimity of

      It isn't necessary to explain
      The dead girl was thought to be with child
      Until it was discovered that her belly had already been cut open
      And a man's head placed where the child would have been

or to the tinge of horror in "Memory a wind passing through the blood trees within us," or to "the defenselessness for which there is no cure" (I quote from "The Recording Angel"), or to the conviction that "The worst is over. / The worst is yet to come," in words from "The Testimony of Light." The disaster, which is history's thumped-down trump card, cannot be thought; to think it, Blanchot says, "is to have no longer any future in which to think it." It can only be evoked, and with a "sort of disinterest, detached from the disaster"—disaster's chemical warfare having damaged the nerves. It is the affirmation and repetition of extremity, the fragmentariness of endemic disarray. At its threshold one is always turned back, yet there is no turning away. It makes of the anonymous continuity of humanity a rumor. To write the disaster is "to refuse to write—to write by way of this refusal"; to offer a text that is almost empty, and to which the reader has to jump to failure's intensity.

The poet's Czech grandmother ("They didn't want you to know the past. They were hoping in this way you could escape it") and other accidents of her history, including her travels with her photojournalist husband Harry Mattison to South Africa, Beirut, Paris, etc., have led her to this non-American acquaintance with extremity. But a blessed fatality of her nature, her liability to lose herself to others (and the effacement of the subject is anyway almost a precondition of writing poetry), explains it best. Like Simone Weil, Forché lacks whatever thickness it takes to refuse to see that history has been refusal for so many.

In the title poem, there is Ellie, once a refugee from the Nazis ("Winter took one of her sons and her own attempt to silence / him, the other")—the poet's ward mate in a Paris hospital, peeling skin from her arm like an opera glove: "Le Dieu est un feu. A psychopath … I wish to leave life." There is, also in Paris, a Salvadoran revenant ("And just now it was as if someone not alive were watching"), whose room, he says, was once ("filled with vultures … belching and vomiting flesh, / as you saw them at Puerto Diablo and El Playon … so fat with flesh they weren't able to fly"). Further, an identification with a Salvadoran woman whose eight-year-old letter Forché still carries ("It was years before my face would become hers … / As if it were possible to go on living for someone else"), who wrote, "Please, when you write, describe again how I looked in the white dress that improbable morning / when my random life was caught in a net of purpose." In the second long "The Notebook of Uprising," there is her grandmother, Anna ("Alenka: You must not speak anymore. I am going to tell you"), and Anna's niece, traced down in what is now the Czech Republic: "She stood on the landing in disbelief in Brno as if the war were translucent behind us, / the little ones in graves the size of pillows." And so on. The litany brings tears.

So much in The Angel of History is mysteriously beautiful, has the dully rich gleam of pewter, is so tinctured with the disaster ("The train rose along the bank above the tiled roofs, its windows blinded by mud and smoke"), and is so cumulative that it is misleading to single out passages, as if they were high points. The whole book must be picked up together, carefully, like the most fragile and most cutting of wonders.

But one of the three poems in Part IV, following the longer poems that make up the first three parts, will doubtless become an anthology piece (even though it deserves better). "The Garden Shukkei-en" finds the poet in Hiroshima. The poem ends with the Japanese woman guide saying in the restored garden:

      I don't like this particular red flower because
      it reminds me of a woman's brain crushed under a roof.
 
      Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difficult to understand?
 
      We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
      But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close.
      As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden.
      And in the silence surrounding what happened to us
 
      it is the bell to awaken God that we've heard ringing.

The pained eloquence is characteristic of the book. As for Eden in what "The Recording Angel" calls "the worst of centuries," it is but a simulacrum of a former paradise, painted in the red of disaster.