Blue HourCarolyn ForcheHarperCollins: 96 pp., $24.95”Now appears...

Blue Hour

Carolyn Forche

HarperCollins: 96 pp., $24.95

“Now appears to us in a mysterious light,” Carolyn Forche remarks in a poem from her new collection, “Blue Hour.” A mysterious light suffuses these pages -- it is the light of the blue hour (or l’heure bleu as the French call the gradual transformation between darkness and day). At this hour, ghosts appear, and the subject of the poems in this clear redemptive luminescence, becomes the act of grieving itself.

Forche has never been shy about taking on the metaphysical enormities nor has she avoided head-on political engagement. Her landmark book, “The Country Between Us,” took on U.S. involvement in El Salvador, took on the corruption of idealism while remaining wholly idealistic in its convictions. Criticized for being a “war tourist,” she nevertheless shocked her poet-contemporaries into political argument. “Blue Hour” is far less confrontational, yet the passion for an engaged awareness, poet-as-citizen-of-the-world, informs her vision. Here, the country is not “between us,” rather it is the entire Earth (“this country called earth”) and humankind is united, against its will, in worldwide death, individual and planetary.

In the long poem “On Earth,” consciousness records its own passing into oblivion in the form of an abecedary, a remarkable poem based on Gnostic hymn structure. It is the touchstone of this eerily beautiful, bruised and persuasive book, these blue dream-like poems unraveling like a shroud. She writes: “The people of this world are moving into the next ....” Oblivion is outlined here, as is atrocity, but also Forche’s particular shade of restoration: the liminal spaces of consciousness, all that is instinctual, lit by fierce apperception, a “dawning,” as we say, of the newly seen.

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Far Side of the Earth

Tom Sleigh

Houghton Mifflin: 104 pp., $22

We begin to interrogate each image for the promise of meaning

we needed to believe in

in order to hold out

against the wheel we were bound to

and enthralled by --

We were children of the earth, sun

of the drugged eye of Mars.

With offhand authority and jagged irony, with Latinate elegance in combination with an ear for the contemporary, Tom Sleigh’s “Far Side of the Earth” also stakes a claim on the planet of the imagination. Here is a style both desultory and quick with vertiginous insight.

Sleigh’s subjects seem remote from each other then flow together: prison cell to the World Trade Center to the texts of ancient spells. He has been compared to Robert Lowell, and this is not a farfetched comparison. He, like Lowell, puts forward an obsessive interrogation of language and form, a fearlessness in both honoring and subverting tradition -- and that rat-a-tat piratical energy that readers of Lowell found irresistible.

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Notes From the

Divided Country

Suji Kwock Kim

Louisiana State: 80 pp., $15.95

I wish I had space in which to consider at length the important debut of “Notes From the Divided Country” by Suji Kwock Kim. It seems to me that this first book (already acknowledged by the 2002 Walt Whitman Award) deserves close and celebratory attention.

Suji “Sue” Kwock Kim has written a book of unforgettable poems; she has found a way, through the medium of language, to allow readers into a double consciousness that is, finally, the poet’s undivided mind. She writes of the “old country” reborn in the New World, of her ancestors in Korea during the Japanese occupation and her immediate family in America: the Trees of Unknowing and Knowledge. She writes of her mother’s death with lamentative, bitter restraint.

In one of the most inspired and brilliant poems, she considers sparrows and their symbology: “How to stay faithful / to earth, how to keep from betraying / its music ... “ she wonders -- and brings us full circle here -- as she, too writes of the Earth that both divides us and brings us together.