Carolyn Forch???'s The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forch??? to return home, asking her to 'talk to the ...
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Carolyn Forch???'s The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forch??? to return home, asking her to 'talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the military aid.' A week later he was assassinated (and is only now being made a saint). Back in the US, Forch??? gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of her second collection, poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma. When the book appeared in 1981, at a time when the conflict in El Salvador had finally forced its way into public awareness, it won her immediate recognition. Briefly available in Britain from Jonathan Cape in the 1980s, it was reissued by Bloodaxe to coincide with the publication by Penguin of Carolyn Forch???'s long awaited memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (Penguin, 2018) followed by a new collection from Bloodaxe, In the Lateness of the World (2020). The Country Between Us has sold tens of thousands of copies on the US, where it has never been out of print. It won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.
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The poems of The Country Between Us, by Carolyn Forche, emerged from the poet's witness of the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s while working for Amnesty International. It does for that war what Picasso's "Guernica" did for the Spanish Civil War, distilling that conflict in all its horror. In her prose poem, "The Colonel," Forche resorts to a surrealist image to convey a distorted reality: "The moon swung bare on its black cord. . ." She juxtaposes opposites to disclose the tension between normalcy and endemic violence: "Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace"; dinner is "rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell. . .for calling the maid." The menace is palpable: ""My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing." In the end, the colonel's gesture exposes the war in all its brutality, arrogance, even perhaps a faint note of hope. As the speaker says in "The Visitor," "There is nothing one man will not do to another." This is a poetry of immense courage, of extremity, of the unspeakable.
