Ethereal Travel into the Blue HourA dying body appears keenly aware of its soul tugging free and submerging into the space that is held for souls escaping the living and transitioning into the spiritual realm. The poems in Carolyn Forché’s book, Blue Hour, are guided by a female narrator, who passes in and out of consciousness during her recollections of memories and reality. Forché’s poetry reveals the narrator’s ability to examine the past, to exist in the present, and to foresee the future. In addition, darkness and light, as well as the reference to spirits and souls, are a consistent theme throughout the poems. Forché masterfully provides visual images of the themes and tone in her writing through her poetic style of language choices and vivid imagery. The poems possess shifting subjects, such as the intimate moments of the narrator’s son and deceased mother, mortality, tributes to victims of war, and the transition that the mind goes through as the body dies. Forché’s poetic style is seen through her visual imagery, abecedarian form, and precise placement of narrative pauses, which effectively emulates the emotions felt by the human mind as it passes in and out of consciousness. The visual imagery in Forché’s poem titled, “Nocturne,” is vivid and powerful. The poem is an elegy to not only the narrator’s mind, but to all who will face mortality. Examples of the searing imagery can be seen through the narrator’s description of the afterlife: “The people of this world are moving into the next, and with them their hours and the ink of their ability to make thought / As a star plummets from darkness, a soul is exiled” (11-13). Forché skillfully evokes images of emptiness and darkness once a soul has left the earth and looks down on the world that is left behind: “Every spring I return to her, laying my thoughts to rest like a wreath on water / These are the words no longer. Here are the photographs taken when we were alive” (15). The feeling of emptiness is also poignantly conveyed in Forché’s descriptions of empty houses: “When the house was alive, its walls recorded the rising and falling of the bed, as if a wind” (12). The author skillfully summons up feelings of darkness, emptiness, and images of people and houses left behind by the dead. Forché’s use of abecedarian form can be seen in the forty-six page poem titled, “On Earth.” The theme of war is depicted through the narrator’s obsessed mind and is cleverly portrayed through a flood of chant like statements, laid out in alphabetical order. An example of the arrangement of the narrator’s thoughts can be seen in the following stanzas, “for the rest of your life, search for them / ghost hands appearing in windows, rubbing them clear / his grave strewn with slipper flowers and sardine cans” (40-41). The narrator’s thoughts, at times, appear fragmented, yet the focus remains on the effects of war: “graves marked with scrap iron, a world in her dead eye, grief of leave-taking, ground fog rising from a graveyard” (40). Forché’s use of abecedarian form powerfully demonstrates the obsessions of the narrator’s mind, through a prayer like tribute of what war has left behind. The placement of the narrative pauses found in Forché’s poem titled, “Blue Hour,” creates meaningful breaks in the narrator’s thoughts, as well as shows moments in time when the narrator’s mind shifts from consciousness to unconsciousness. In the poem, the narrator appears to have one foot on earth and one foot inside the spiritual realm: “here, where there was almost nothing, we waited in the birch-lit clouds, holding the uncertain hand of a lost spirit” (7). Forché places a long dash, with several blank lines before the next thought begins, emphasizing a transition of the narrator’s mind leaving the spiritual realm and returning to life, as she reminisces about an intimate moment with her son: “When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding …” (7). Another example shows the narrator remembering a childhood experience, “At night I banged the brace against the wooden crib bars and cried …” (3). Directly after the line, Forché places several blank lines to infer another transition of the narrator, this time into the afterlife, “…From the quarry of souls they come into being: supernal lights, concealed light, light which has no end” (3). The author is able to convey an unstable mind within her narrator; a mind that continuously leaves the body, only to return to it again and again, as if uncertain of when to let go. Carolyn Forché’s poetry in, Blue Hour, delivers an ethereal transformation of the human mind as it struggles to let go and embrace the spiritual world. Through Forché’s brilliant technique with visual imagery, abecedarian form, and strategically placed narrative pauses, the powerful images of what the mind must endure is conveyed through its travels in and out of consciousness, holding on to memories while transitioning into the spiritual realm. Memories must be remembered and knowledge of the afterlife must be embraced in preparation for death. Mortality is faced head on as the narrator endures a tugging of the soul through the memories and tributes to those left behind.
The difficulty of giving a book a rating goes without saying, but Forché's Blue Hour presents an extra challenge; the volume only collects 11 poems, including a 47-page abecedarium. How to rate a book with any precision when ¾ of it are dedicated to a single piece? I doubt there is a way.All the same I enjoyed this book and want to rate it well. I think it finds Forché returning to a more lyric sensibility than in the volumes immediately before it, and I think her political project benefits from that return. Unlike the explicitly political poems you might find in The Angel of History, for example, (I'm relying on memory here, not having the book abroad with me) the political appears as fragments of the whole. The result reminds me of the successes of Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," where from the midst of what seems gibberish occasionally surfaces a clear bell-note of a political statement that reverberates all the more deeply in the context of a thirty page work resisting traditional sense-making. This is not to say that Forché's "On Earth," is gibberish in any fashion, or any other poem in the book. But the broader context of the writing project, the varied and fluxuating imagery, the lyric apparatus, all work to nurture and sometimes foreground the political statements that emerge. "On Earth," in particular, lures the reader into the comfort of form with its abecedarian progression and seemingly disassociated lines, so that when a radical image or statement arrives, it jars the reader to greater effect. As such, the poem pursues its mission on multiple strata, as any close reading of, say, "The Colonel," should also reveal.Perhaps this is a more direct testament, though: I've already written a response to "On Earth," and I intend to read the poem again, all 47 pages of it, sometime in the next day or two.
Do You like book Blue Hour (2004)?
Saw Forche read at the UND writer's conference. I first read Forche poetry in high school so she's been around a long time although she's only published four volumes. The centerpiece of this book is a 42 page alphabet-indexed poem imitiating Gnostic abecedarian hymns. It's a poem of snippets, tiny moment, little images. Here are a few of my favorites, which pulled from the overall work seem to form a little poem of their own: as any backward look is fictive...born with a map of calamity in her palm...cathedral bells chiseling the winter air...if rope were writing he would have hanged himself...the stories nested, each opening to the next...the street's memory of abandoned shoes...while I lived in that other world, years went by in this one.... Forche has spent her entire adult life living in countries at war. She's got worlds of experience to draw on, and truly awe-inspiring skills with language.
—Carolyn
Another one of those books that makes me worry that I don't actually like poetry. Forché gives me a line or three per page that really strike me, but I would have to work harder than I apparently want to in order to understand what she is talking about beyond the fact that she has known someone(s?) who died. She plays with the boundary between comprehensible description of reality and abstract imagery, and her transitions between the two are so frequent and seamless that I find it pretty hard to follow. I am not sure whether I envy her confidence in writing a book that expects such a commitment of energy from the reader.
—Kat
This book is unlike anything I've ever read. The 45-page, gnostic-abcederian "On Earth" is haunting and masterful. This is a list at its best and most forceful. As certain motifs and words reappeared, a tension arose for me between witnessing and repeating. Such recording, of course, is essential, but devastating. Certain of Forche's lines helped me read her: “a random life caught in a net of purpose” (16); “as any new act inflicts its repetition” (32); “as the fence has recorded the wind” (33); “spoken in unknown words of a known language” (54).
—Nicola
