The Angel of History: A Haunting Poetic Meditation on Memory, the Holocaust, and Survival

The Angel of History: A Haunting Poetic Meditation on Memory, the Holocaust, and Survival

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future. “A dark, richly textured, complicated world...that great rarity, an altogether new thing.” - Boston Globe “A difficult book to put down, or to forget...Forche proves once again that socially conscious poetry is not a contradiction in terms.” - Review of Books Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future. Carolyn Forché is the author of Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award; The Country Between Us, which received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America; and The Angel of History, awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Centuly Poetry of Witness. Recently she was presented with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son. The Angel of History By Forche, Carolyn Perennial Copyright © 2004 Carolyn Forche All right reserved. ISBN: 0060925841 The Angel of History There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world. When French was the secret music of the street, the cafe, the train, my own receded and became intimacy and sleep. In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed-upon lie, and it bound me to itself, demanding of my life an explanation. When my son was born I became mortal. Our days at Cape Enrage, a bleached shack of rented rooms and white air. April. At the low tide acres of light, boats abandoned by water. While sleeping, the child vanishes from his life. Years later, on the boat from Beirut, or before the boat, an hour before, helicopters lifting a white veil of sea. A woman broken into many women. These boats, forgotten, have no keels. So it is safe for them, and the emptiness beneath them safe.April was here briefly. The breakwater visible, the lighthouse, but no horizon. The music resembled April, the gulls, April, but you weren't walking toward this house. If the child knew words, if it weren't necessary for him to question me with his hands--To have known returning would be like this, that the sea light of April had been your vigilance. In the night-vaulted corridors of the Hotel-Dieu, a sleepless woman pushes her stretcher along the corridors of the past. Bonjour, madame. Je m'appelle Ellie. There were trains, and beneath them, laddered fields. Autumns the fields were deliberately burned by a fire so harmless children ran through it making up a sort of game. Women beat the flames with brooms and blankets, so the fires were said to be under control. As for the children, they were forbidden to ask about the years before they were born. Yet they burned the fields, yet everything was said to be under control with the single phrase death traffic . This is Izieu during the war, Izieu and the neighboring village of Bregnier-Cordon. This is a farmhouse in Izieu, Itself a quiet place of stone houses over the Rhone, where between Aprils, forty-four children were hidden successfully for a year in view of the mountains. Until the fields were black and snow fell all night over the little plaque which does not mention that they were Jewish children hidden April to April in Izieu near Bregnier-Cordon. Comment me vint l'criture? Comme un duvet d'oiseau sur ma vitre, en hiver. In every window a blank photograph of their internment. 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.