Poetry of Witness is a companion to Carolyn Forché's landmark 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting, which collected poems from around the world bearing witness to the war and devastation of the 20th century. This time, Forché, in collaboration with fellow Georgetown professor Duncan Wu, concentrates on English-language poetry--but widens the scope to encompass the last half-millennium.
There are 300 poems anthologized here, from Shakespeare and Milton to the Irish radical William Drennan, American abolitionist Eliza Lee Follen and the Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali. The selections are chronological and fall into six categories: the Age of Tyranny, the Civil War (the one in 17th-century England), the Age of Uncertainty, Revolutionary Upheaval, Civil War and Civil Liberties and the Age of World War.
"In conditions of extremity" such as war and suffering, Forché writes, "the witness is in relation, and cannot remove him or herself. Relation is proximity and this closeness subjects the witness to the possibility of being wounded... the witness who writes out of extremity writes his or her wound, as if such writing were making an incision." More radically, she suggests that the very act of reading such poems, as the poet's trauma is "made present before us," is itself a bearing of witness, as "the text we read becomes a living archive."
Forché's living archive is testament to the travails of men and women over the last 500 years, collected and curated with infinite care. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.