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'the world's ensouling'

Published in The Bookpress

In her notes about her previous book, The Angel of History nearly a decade ago, Carolyn Forché says that her early poetic "has given way to a work which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration." The poems in Blue Hours are still haunted with various voices and maintain her lovely lyrical, elegeic tone. They are paradoxically more broken yet more restorative. She writes in the title poem, "Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments" (2). As luminous moments accumulate across the eleven poems in this collection a kind of affirmation is practiced that is spiritual, historical, and personal.

Blue Hour opens with a quote from Martin Buber: "These moments are immortal, and most transitory of all; no content may be secured from them....Beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again." Forché’s sense of these transitory experiences is that they are not snapshots, the flow of events is not frozen; they are built up to by history as well as revealed in memory. In this way, time is neither linear as usually conceived of nor dismissed as Romantics often do. But this other way of experience requires a no-longer and not-yet sense, a place between boundaries. In the title poem, Forché writes, "When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding at l'heure bleue -cerulean, gentian, hyacinth, delft, jouvence. What were also the milk hours" (7). She defines term "blue hour" as "between darkness and day, between the night of a soul and its redemption, an hour associated with pure hovering" (71). The image of hovering, pause and motion held, recalls the spirit of the Lord in Genesis over the watery chaos, that moment of creation.

In Forché's liminal blue hours, time enlarges. For example, she reports that "My son rows toward me against the wind. For thirty-six years, he rows. In 1986, he is born in Paris" (2). The moment of birth has its antecedent long before conception or even meeting the father. Notice that she uses the present tense: the child "rows" as if he is still approaching, still arriving.

The language is consistently rich. Even when conveying harsh content, the writing is elegant and musical: "Beneath the ice, open-eyed but absent, she who I was, with ribbon scars faint across her. Every tip of wheat-stalk lit by sun" (12), "...a broken clock, a boy wakened by his father's whip, then the world as if whorled into place-" (24), "so that the dead climb up out of the river to blacken its banks" (53). From her first book, Carolyn Forché has proven herself to be a poet of remarkable lyricism and imagery, but starting in The Angel of History and even more fulfilled in this collection, she makes language itself a voice among her many other voices, a presence and subject. With titles like "Sequestered Writing" and "Writing Kept Hidden" and even "Prayer" there is a concentration on the life-work of writing and language.

She remarks directly on this with "that ing-ing of verbs in an eternal present" (54) which reinforces her use of tense in other poems. Likewise, with the phrase "dreaming nouns remembered until a window" (38) condenses how remembered images give way to the present scene. In both examples, she makes plain how language merges with and influences the experience. As another way of expressing this, Forché includes throughout the book word lists like the types of blue cited above or like "keepsake, knell, Kyrie" (46). Never surreal, these elements intensify the real. The use of nouns slows the language from its flow in syntax to thing, thing, thing and draws attention to discrete images, either experienced in "the during of the world" (45) or in memory. Even as she affirms that writing is "the guardian of the past" (31), she also indicates the limits of expression, how it cannot carry the fullness of our lives when she writes "a word dissolved into the yet-again / a world set in language and deserted." Later, she writes that "resting language or language under surveillance / reverses itself as we read it" (51).

These examples come from the 46 page chant "On Earth." Formed entirely of phrases, like the ones quoted above, arranged alphabetically, this poem fully embodies the spiritual hovering of time and the possibilities as well as shortcomings of language to mediate experience. In the list are indications of how to read it. The phrase "a litany of broken but remembered events" is one way to conceive of the fragments, but she writes that "meaning did not survive that loss of sequence" (47) as if to acknowledge that sense breaks down in some fundamental way without typical linear sequencing. Still, there is meaning, a knowing. The form itself enacts the liminal experience of no-longer being lyrical, linear poems but not-yet whole awarenesses. The mind seeks to unify the lines, particularly since they are set into stanzas. Notice how the following lines build in the sequence of sentence syntax then almost dissolve:

When the sequence becomes lists or as connections and contexts become harder to recognize, the mind is active, synthesizing, comparing, reversing and moving forward. The rhythm of this accumulation, according to Andy Fogle, the book reviewer for PopMatters, is "slow, hypnotic, gorgeous, and at times frightening." It is also terrifying because the book is full of refugees, graves, cities where "phosphorous fell" (60), razor wire, and the other personal experience of brutal history. This is territory one expects from this poet, but in the context of the blue hour, there is the possibility of restoration.

Not a book for bedtime reading and not poems for those who want narrative, Blue Hour is demanding, but its rewards are at a whole other level. It bodies forth what it says about the "world's ensouling in a gallery of sadness" (60). At first, the images and the lyricism of the rich language stand out, then the complexity of the awareness impresses, and finally the profound spiritual experience of living "in the bardo of becoming" (43) releases joy. Blue Hour will open itself with each returning.

© Edward A. Dougherty