Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The work of Carolyn Forché has always retained a political edge, with works such as the exploration of her Czech background in Gathering the Tribes (1976) and her account of visits to El Salvador in The Country Between Us (1981). Forché has been one of the leading poets who, in her own words, has combatted the "self-censorship operative among American poets and writers that seemed to preclude writing about...historical events when those events were still unsafe" (qtd. in Stein 147). Her third book of poems The Angel of History (published 13 years later), however, represents a new turn for her work, one whose title and epigraph suggest the key role of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. While Forché has alluded to the influence of Benjamin in a Text and Performance Quarterly interview (65), the extent to which her work embodies the principles of Benjamin's messianic materialism remains unexplored. This engagement with Benjamin not only brings Forché's own poetry to a new level of historical complexity, but also makes The Angel of History one of the important poetic texts of the last decade.
Repository Citation
Clinton, Alan. "Mechanical Angel: Carolyn Forché and the Material Projection of Messianic History." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 2, 2002, pp. 1–22. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss2/2