Carolyn Forché paid extended visits to El Salvador, working as a journalist and human rights advocate. She could not have known that land would be Topic A in the U.S. just at the time her second book appeared; thanks to that coincidence, though, some of the poems in The Country Between Us have the urgency of news bulletins…. (p. 83)

The brutalities visited on the helpless [in El Salvador] naturally arouse Forché's sympathy and anger. She makes pain palpable. Yet her accounts of antigovernment rebels are neither polemical nor romanticized: "It is not Che Guevara, this struggle." She addresses the guerrillas as friends but tells them what they do not want to hear…. [Forché's] is a bleak message, passionately stated. That description holds for the poems in this volume that are not about El Salvador; meditations on Viet Nam, Czechoslovakia, relatives, friends, lovers old and new...