Gathering the Tribes

The poems in Gathering the Tribes recount experiences from the author's adolescence and young-adult life, closely bound to the natural cycles of the seasons, of generations, of the body's functioning. Stanley Kunitz writes in his foreword that they seek "to understand the bonds of family, race, and sex." Many deal with uprootedness--hasty emigrations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, the loss of grandparents and other elders, people leaving and being sent away. But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature, and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forch seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith, the balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history--both natural and social--and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forch 's poetry, gives it its depth and dimension.