Introduction & Overview of The Garden Shukkei-en by Carolyn Forché

The Garden Shukkei-en Introduction

Carolyn Forché initially published "The Garden Shukkei-en" in Provincetown Arts in 1988 and included it in her third collection, The Angel of History (1994). The poem was also shown in conjunction with Danz Macabre photographic art exhibit at the School of Art, Arizona State University at Tempe and is included in the portfolio of show photographs, So to Speak . Forché takes the title and epigraph of The Angel of History from Walter Benjamin's essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In haunting disembodied voices, the poems in the collection detail the atrocities of various twentieth-century horrors such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. In "The Garden Shukkei-en," which appears towards the end of the collection, a Japanese woman who survived the bombing recounts the horrors of that time and how it has come to shape the ways in which she remembers the...
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