Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

After Auschwitz, there can be no poetry, Theodor Adorno wrote shortly after World War II. This collection by Carolyn Forche is one long passionate rejoinder.

Forche, who herself has written powerful poems opposed to the brutality in El Salvador, has collected here some of the most dramatic antiwar and anti-torture poetry written in this benighted century. It is her claim, ably defended by the poems she includes, that such art is vital not only for understanding the Auschwitzes of the age, but also for overcoming them.

"The poetry of witness," she writes in her introduction, "defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion. . . . "The resistance to terror is what makes the world habitable: the protest against violence will not be forgotten and this insistent memory renders life possible in communal situations."

Forche organizes her ambitious work into fifteen sections, encompassing wars and repressions from around the globe. And she presents 145 poets. For each section, Forche provides a few paragraphs of prologue; for each poet, a few sentences. Many of the poets are expected, such as the obligatory Wilfred Owen and other familiar names: W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Andre Breton, Anna Akhmatova, Ariel Dorfman, Joseph Brodsky, Federico Garcia Lorca, Gunter Grass, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Daniel Berrigan. But there are more obscure writers here, as well, and one of the joys of the book is to make their acquaintance.

Forche begins with the Armenian genocide of 1909-1918, when the Ottoman Turkish government killed 1.5 million Armenians. In the prologue to her first section, she quotes the telling remark Hitler made to his military cabinet shortly before invading Poland: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Carolyn Forche does. She includes the Armenian poet Siamento, who was executed on April 24, 1915. "Don't be afraid. I must tell you what I say/so people will understand/the crimes men do to men," Siamento writes in "The Dance," retelling a witness's account of a gruesome atrocity against twenty Armenian women, which ended in them being burned alive. "How can I dig out my eyes,/how can I dig, tell me?" the witness asks a corpse at the end of the poem.

Many of the poems here are eyes-open, horrifyingly graphic portrayals of human brutality. But other poems are of defiance, demonstrating resolve and extracting hope even in the most extreme...