SOURCE: A review of The Angel of History, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 5, January 31, 1994, pp. 77-8.

[Here, the critic offers a favorable review of The Angel of History.]

Though Forché's (The Country Between Us) previous books have been groundbreaking works of political and moral depth, this new volume may be the most remarkable. Ambitious and authentic, The Angel of History is an overarching book-length poem, composed in numbered sections, that invokes the horror of contemporary times in a mode reminiscent of Eliot's The Waste Land. Much as Eliot's poem refracted WW I, the vacuity of culture and the fragmentation of modern life, Forché considers the Holocaust, Hiroshima and genocide in Latin America—the dismal past that predicates the chaotic present. Her vehicle is the Angel of History, who confronts human cruelty and misery but can do no more than record them, as explained by Walter Benjamin in...