SOURCE: "Postlyrically yours," in The Threepenny Review, Vol. XV, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 18-20.

[In the excerpt below, Bedient offers a favorable assessment of The Angel of History.]

Carolyn Forché's The Angel of History is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically "inevitable" response to a half-century of atrocities that has yet been written in English. Each rereading becomes more hushed, more understanding, more painful, more rapt. A sort of bedrock of acquaintance with human misery, as of memory's capacity to witness it, emerges in lines that are each peculiarly forlorn: "The cry is cut from its stalk."

Forché creates—was given—a new tone, at once sensitive and bleak, a new rhythm, at once prose-like and exquisite, a new line and method of sequencing, at once fluid and fragmentary, frozen at the turn. Take the third unnumbered section of the title poem, which...