Gathering the Tribes
by Carolyn Forché
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An examination of kinship and uprootedness, Gathering the Tribes is the first volume of poetry by Carolyn Forché and the 71st volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets The poems in Gathering the Tribes recount experiences from the author's adolescence and young†'adult life, closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body's functioning. Many deal with uprootedness-hasty emigrations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, the loss of grandparents and other elders, show more people leaving and being sent away. But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forché seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith. The balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history-both natural and social-and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forché's poetry and gives it its depth and dimension. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This is a book to be read and re-read--I don't want to say "studied." I want to say experienced and felt. I love this feeling of how she is weaving into her poems this sensuality, this feel for textures, this connection to lineage and ancestry. Her grandmother, Anna, as representative of the passage of history and what she passes on, and the wisdom she gives to her. And her sexual poems are by far my favorite, a subtly that shows in understatement there is a far more powerful effect. Simplicity, but not simple.
Must Read Poems:
"Burning the Tomato Worms"
"Year at Mudstraw"
"Taking off my Clothes"
Must Read Poems:
"Burning the Tomato Worms"
"Year at Mudstraw"
"Taking off my Clothes"
The opening section of this book, dealing with the poet's Eastern European roots and the trials and tragedies of WWII, is among the best poetry I've ever read. Powerful, stark, homely, and ultimately redeeming.
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23+ Works 2,482 Members
Carolyn Forche 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, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: show more Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Recently, she was presented with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm. show less
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- Canonical title
- Gathering the Tribes
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- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.71)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
