Table of Contents

15 Museum of Stones
16 The Boatman
17 Water Crisis
18 Report from an Island
19 The Last Puppet
21 The Lightkeeper
22 The Crossing
23 Exile
24 Fisherman
25 For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo
26 The Lost Suitcase
28 Last Bridge
30 Elegy for an Unknown Poet
32 Letter to a City Under Siege
33 Travel Papers
38 The Refuge of Art
40 A Room
45 The Ghost of Heaven
48 Ashes to Guazapa
49 Hue: From a Notebook
50 Morning on the Island
51 A Bridge
52 The End of Something
53 Early Life
54 Tapestry
55 Visitation
56 In Time of War
57 Lost Poem
58 Charmolypi
59 Souffrance
60 Sanctuary
61 Uninhabited
62 Clouds
63 Passage
64 Light of Sleep
65 Theologos
67 Mourning
68 Transport
69 Early Confession
70 Toward the End
72 What Comes

75 Dedications and notes
76 Acknowledgements

About the Author

Carolyn Forche was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. She has taught at several universities, and is now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, and the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award (given in 1997) for using her poetry as a 'means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities'. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), drew on her experiences in El Salvador during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2003), and In the Lateness of the World (due in 2016). Her landmark anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993), was followed by Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (Norton, 2014), edited with Duncan Wu. Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).

Reviews

It has been 17 years since Carolyn Forché published a book of poems, and In the Lateness of the World announces she is back. Coming fast on the heels of her memoir of last year this book is bursting with poems of migration, crossing, and looking back. It is as if the poet is standing, one foot in the river, wondering which way the next crossing will go. Drawing on her own travels and periods of reporting, on the world’s seemingly endless upheaval, these poems move beyond disquiet and creates the charged ethical field in which we all live, all the time, especially at that moment we move.
*Lit Hub*

Carolyn Forché makes a complex voice for all the mute victims of our destructive world as the killing goes on and the patterns of our lives continue our committed self-destruction. Hers is the heroism which still cares.
*Robert Creeley*

Part of poetry’s tragic knowledge is that elegy is endless. Yet in its power to recall and to memorialise, elegy also effaces time and reinvests loss, the lost, with life. It is a form of overcoming, essential to our knowing of, and dwelling in, the present and to our becoming human… Carolyn Forché is one of the contemporary masters of that form, that act.
*Michael Palmer*

Again Carolyn Forché hovers above the lacerated landscape of history filling the holes “between saying and said”. Blue Hour does not console but emboldens. The fear we share is never dodged. This singular voice is writ in bone, snow, coal, stone and sorrow.
*C.D. Wright*