The Country Between Us
by Carolyn Forché
Category: POETRY

Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forché to return home, asking her to talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us and convince them to stop the military aid. A week later Archbishop Romero was assassinated. Back in the US, Forché gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of this second collection of poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma.