Against forgetting : twentieth-century poetry of witness / edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché

Includes bibliographical references (p. [763]-783) and index.

This large volume assembles the work of nearly 150 poets, all marked in some direct way by the century's wars or devastations. Many of the poets did not survive these conflicts--some painfully perfect works by the Hungarian Miklos Radnoti were exhumed with his body from a mass grave in 1946--and others survived only to commit suicide later on. As an anthologist, poet Forché vows to present a "poetic memorial to those who suffered and resisted through poetry itself,'' rather than to propose a "canon'' of their works, but her book honors both intentions. Apart from the voices' high moral ground, the common preference for laconic understatement is notable; objectified horrors seem to expunge any bent toward self-pity or sententiousness.