In her recent book of essays, Light Up the Cave, Denise Levertov speaks of the need, in the 1960s, to create a new form for political poetry since, in the past, it had been narrative and epic in nature, and those forms were no longer viable. It is fitting, then, that Levertov says of this collection by Carolyn Forche:

Here's a poet who's doing what I want to do … she is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political, lyrical and engaged.

Uncommon as blurbs go, there could be no better way to describe The Country Between Us. What is crucial here is that it took a poet of the next generation, a decade after the furor of the Vietnam War, to achieve what Levertov, among others, had been aiming for….

Forche has learned she does not have to list the horrors over and...