{"product_id":"9781780378183-otherwhere-new-selected-poems-1976-2026","title":"Otherwhere","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNew \u0026amp; Selected Poems 1976–2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarolyn Forché's own selection from five previously published collections plus new poems is prefaced with an introductory essay, \u003cem\u003eOlder Than Glass, Younger Than Music: a poetics\u003c\/em\u003e, in which she relates her life and times to her development as a poet and thinker, tracing the shifts in her poetry over 50 years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarolyn Forché is one of America’s most important contemporary poets – renowned as a ‘poet of witness’ – as well as an indefatigable human rights activist. Over five decades, she has crafted visionary work that has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, enquiries and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHer meditative poetry has a majestic sweep, with themes ranging from life on earth and human existence to history, war, genocide and the Holocaust. Her retrospective, \u003cem\u003eOtherwhere\u003c\/em\u003e, is published fifty years after her debut, \u003cem\u003eGathering the Tribes, \u003c\/em\u003ewinner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975. It includes selections from that book and from four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: \u003cem\u003eThe Country Between Us\u003c\/em\u003e (1981\/2019), \u003cem\u003eThe Angel of Histor\u003c\/em\u003ey (1994), \u003cem\u003eBlue Hour\u003c\/em\u003e (2003) and \u003cem\u003eIn the Lateness of the World\u003c\/em\u003e (2021), and opens with \u003cem\u003eIf there is ink\u003c\/em\u003e, a group of 16 new poems. According to Joyce Carol Oates (\u003cem\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e), Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine and Denise Levertov. Jane Miller called \u003cem\u003eBlue Hour\u003c\/em\u003e ‘a masterwork for the 21st century’.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCarolyn Forché's own selection from her books is prefaced with an introductory essay, \u003cem\u003eOlder Than Glass, Younger Than Music: a poetics\u003c\/em\u003e, in which she relates her life and times to her development as a poet and thinker, tracing the shifts in her poetry across her five collections. This concludes: 'What draws me to poetry is mystery, sensibility, and the hidden architecture of the poem, excavated in its making, and revealed in the tremor of its wakefulness. When I’m truly writing, the poem takes me as close as possible to the precipice, and allows me to see, however obliquely, what the other has seen. Only the poem knows the route, tacking between temporal latitudes until the armada of impeding thoughts have been blown off course. We live in a sea of ambient language: speech that surrounds and is also within us: why not set it in motion to a music of its own? – at least to honor what we experienced, from ancient times to the present, for words are not rubble, but mosaic chips of salvific time and radiant naming, fragments of intelligence however fleeting, random signifiers that taken together become the shrine of a poem, a holy place.' \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57194717151606,"sku":"9781780378183","price":11.21,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/stand_40204174_2639f6d6-2071-4a1d-ada0-ed93a09da6e4.jpg?v=1772685525","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9781780378183-otherwhere-new-selected-poems-1976-2026","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}