In our deeply bifurcated world, Forché’s best writing engages in a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination. Which she is, though she prefers the term “poetry of witness.” Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? They help us to consider our memories of Auschwitz or an image of immigrants drowned in the Rio Grande.

For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now sixty-nine, has been characterized as a political poet. It’s precisely the absence of those easy markers-the triumph of good over evil, truth lighting the way-that makes the poet and activist Carolyn Forché’s work chilling and unique. “After it had been published,” he said, “I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway!’ ” Implicit in Auden’s and Moore’s self-criticism is their aversion not only to the declarative but to the general-to the poet’s “I” taking on the mantle of “we.” And yet the English-language reader is particularly attuned to that kind of broad rhetoric, which can be found in poems ranging from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” because, despite Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen,” we equate political poetry with momentum and a kind of galvanizing sound-a cry of victory in a world hellbent on oppression and darkness. We must love one another or die”-because he considered the work fundamentally dishonest. Auden famously turned his back on his poem “September 1, 1939,” written on the occasion of Germany’s invasion of Poland-“All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie . . . First this thought and then that.” Moore was not the first author to question what you might call her reactive voice. “It is just a protest-disjointed, exclamatory. . . . In a 1961 interview, the great modernist poet Marianne Moore expressed ambivalence about her popular 1943 antiwar verse, “In Distrust of Merits.” “As form, what has it?” Moore said.

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