The history of our age is not the stuff of epic poetry. It has plenty of warfare, of course, but not much in the way of heroism; there is more bureaucratese than grandiloquence in the speeches of its leaders; and its chaotic pace would chew up any meter after a dithyramb or two. So what's a poet to do? Many tend their gardens. But a poetry that withdraws from the public concerns of its time for whatever reasons—aesthetic objections, information overload, lack of firsthand experience, indifference—impoverishes itself and its readers. We're left with the schizoid vision of the 6 o'clock news: a chaotic sense of the present—what was that country we're invading?—coupled with a handful of clichés that anesthetize the past. Poets of history like Neruda and Milosz take us beyond that split, revivifying the past as they uncover its links to the world today.

A poet of history inevitably offers some kind of political vision, and Carolyn Forché has long been aware of this dimension in her work. Her first book, Gathering the Tribes, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1976, is grounded in a politics of identity: ethnic (with her Eastern European ancestors), spiritual (with Native Americans) and sexual. Her second collection, The Country Between Us (1981), moved toward a more overtly political stance, dramatizing her personal reaction to struggles in Europe, Vietnam and most notably El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights activist. This book derives much of its force from an insistence on the poet's witnessing of the events. Her well-known account of dinner with a Salvadoran colonel who collected the severed ears of his victims begins, "What you have heard is true. I was in his house."

For all its power, however, the limits of this approach have become clear to Forché in the thirteen years since her last book came out. But her new volume turns away from what she calls the "first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poem" of her earlier work. It reflects her increased awareness of the pitfalls of a reportorial approach to oppression: a naïve faith that verse will change the world, the unconscious egotism of the witness, traces of voyeurism in the portrayal of the oppressed. Her work compiling and editing the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness has also been instrumental in moving her poetry beyond the politics of personal encounter. The Angel of History is rather an extended poetic meditation on the broader contexts—historical, aesthetic, philosophical—which include our century's atrocities. The collection represents a deeper and more complex engagement with her political concerns and a startling departure in style to achieve this. It's clearly a breakthrough.

Forché's new book is well aware of its situation at the end of the century. It takes its title from Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in which history is seen as a growing pile of debris from what appears to the observing angel to be one single catastrophe; he looks back at it but can do nothing, as he is propelled continuously into an unknown future. His situation, of course, parallels that of the poet, and the fragmentary units with which Forché works have a rubblelike combination of specificity and disconnectedness. The core poetic material for The Angel of History is a body of shattered elegiac evocations, running from as little as a phrase to a few stanzas in length. Some of these arise from personal experience and memory, others from her reading, others from the words and experiences of real or imagined characters. To her credit, Forché has resisted the postmodern temptation to juggle with the ruins. Though aware of the slipperiness and essential relativity of language, she holds to the idea that history demands something more than an arbitrary order from those who would engage it.

At the heart of the book are the three long sequences with which it opens: "The Angel of History," "The Notebook of Uprising" and "The Recording Angel." As their titles suggest, these pieces are to some extent interwoven, sharing common concerns with the violence of our century and the challenge of getting it on paper. Within the one vast disaster that the angel sees, Forché singles out the Holocaust and Hiroshima as the two defining atrocities of our time, approaching them from different perspectives in the opening sequences (Parts I, II and III) and then defining her points more directly in the three short elegies of Part IV. The final section of the volume, "Book Codes" (Part V), sets the work in perspective by raising questions about the power of writing to deal with this material. Forché's goal in focusing on the two catastrophes is not so much to explain them—who could do that?—as to keep them from being forgotten or distorted as they recede in time and survivors die. If memory is, as she puts it in "The Notebook of Uprising," "a reliquary in a wall of silence," it's important to have scenes there that will continue to speak.

It's also important to make distinctions. As The Angel of History progresses, Forché's specific vision of the two atrocities becomes clear. The atomic bomb represents a single starting point for the age, "the moment of the birth of this cloud," as she puts it in "Book Codes: III," while the death camps are the center of a web that binds us inextricably to the past. The obsessive, grinding, all-encompassing quality of the Holocaust—the way it intertwines the living and the dead, perpetrators, victims and those not yet born—comes out vividly in the poet's engagement with diverse sources, from the notes in a child's prayer book found at Theresienstadt—"V.K. 1940, hearts, a police doll wearing the star" ("The Notebook of Uprising")—to the deadened phrases of those who worked at the ovens ("Elegy") and the fractured, multilingual testimony of the survivor Ellie in the title sequence. Everything about this topic is speaking, complex, demandingly human. Forché's treatment of Hiroshima, by contrast, captures the suddenness and horrible simplicity of the act:

       After the city vanished, they were carried on black mats from one place
       To another with no one to answer them
       Vultures watching from the white trees
       A portable safe found stuffed with charred paper
       An incense burner fused to its black prayer
                 ("The Recording Angel")

The account is flat, end-stopped, largely unpunctuated, with everything in black and white, a list of seemingly disconnected facts inhabited by an anonymous dying "they." When a survivor speaks in "The Garden Shukkei-en," her comments are hauntingly laconic, set off in brief stanzas of a line or two:

       Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?
 
       We tried to dress our burns with vegetable oil.
 
       Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difficult to understand?

Forché uses these complementary formats—the polyglot and the muted, the intricate and the simple—to frame the brutality of our epoch. Each in its own way shows both the essentially unspeakable quality of the event and the necessity that the subject be engaged.

The differences between Forché's treatment of the Holocaust and that of Hiroshima suggest the wealth of possibilities her new style can bring to bear. Linked by themes and occasional repeated phrases as they are, the opening sequences represent distinct approaches to the horrors of our time. The first [sequence], "The Angel of History," works with fairly large units, scenes really—the story of Ellie, a hospital stay, the poet leaving Beirut, the birth of her son—which are presented early in the sequence and then broken, juxtaposed and repeated in variations of different lengths as the work progresses. Forché's mode here is not narrative but analytical, as if the encounter with Ellie were a jewel she holds up to the light and revolves, each facet presenting the scene in a different context. Viewed this way, the life of one survivor documents an era.

The second sequence, "The Notebook of Uprising," is, as the title suggests, more journal-like in approach, its twenty-eight numbered sections loosely following a trip to Eastern Europe where the poet finds the niece of her grandmother Anna in the Czech Republic. Instead of shifting angles here, Forché is digging through layers—Prague today, during the Warsaw Pact invasion, under the Nazis—to clarify what has lasted and what has been lost. Her lines have less of the documentary and more of the diary to them, with a focus on numinous moments and their ramifications, as in the second entry:

       Anna stands in a ring of thawed snow, stirring a trash fire in an iron drum until her face
              flares, shriveled and intent, and sparks rise in the night along with pages of
       burning
              ash from the week's papers,
              one peeling away from the rest,
       an ashen page framed in brilliance.
 
       For a moment, the words are visible, even though fire has destroyed them, so
              transparent has the page become.
       The sparks from this fire hiss out among the stars and in thirty years appear
              as tracer rounds.
       They didn't want you to know the past. They were hoping in this way you could escape it.

The final sequence of ten large sections is the broadest in its focus and the most meditative. In big stanzas of long endstopped lines with minimal punctuation, "The Recording Angel" washes across passages of memory and description like a tide, gathering up references to the two previous sequences and quotations from René Char, Georg Trakl, Elias Canetti and others along with its own new material. The motifs underlying this sequence are broad, almost archetypes—a shipwreck, a child asking questions, a man walking and walking—and each section ends with a kind of residue of understanding, as the work's conclusions remain after the scenes have passed. The lyricism of the fourth is typical:

       On the water's map, little x's: a cross-stitched sampler of cries for help
       And yet every lost one has been seen, mornings in winter, and at night
       When the fishermen have cast their nets one too many times
       They surface, the lost, drawing great hillocks of breath
       We on the shore no longer vanish when the beacon strokes us
       The child's boat plies the water in imitation of boats
       Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn
       Voices from a ketch lit by candles
       Days pass and nothing occurs, nights pass, nights, and life continues in its passing
       We must try then to send a message ending with the word night

Forché's elegiac vision in "The Recording Angel" provides a moving conclusion to the three sequences. The poetic singing here is the most beautiful of Forché's modes in the book, but she has found an appropriately jagged music for the first sequence and an intimate density for the second. In each sequence she makes brilliant use of the possibilities her approach offers, controlling juxtapositions, variations on themes, repetition and sudden bursts of the new.

The "Book Codes" poems that conclude The Angel of History bring to the surface Forché's questions about the power and value of her craft. The last two—one carrying references to the Holocaust, the other to Hiroshima—are set in parallel forms of equal-length stanzas with closure on a haunting isolated line. The effect is striking aesthetically and emotionally:

        an afternoon swallowing down whole years its every hour
        troops marching by in the snow until they are transparent
        from the woods through tall firs a wood with no apparent end
        cathedrals at the tip of our tongues with countries not yet seen
        whoever can cry should come here
                     ("Book Codes: II")

The boldness of Forché's move at the end is typical of the volume as a whole. The Angel of History is challenging, ambitious poetry, and the book lives up to its claims.