Analysis Of Carolyn Fouchè's Poems

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Within the 20th century European epoch a new kind of poetry emerged, one permeated by its current political situation, both complicating and encouraging contemporary writer’s ability to exercise agency. Carolyn Fouchè, an American poet and Human Rights activist found her in this situation whilst working in El Salvador for Amnesty International. It was in these journeys that Fouchè came face to face with the gross human injustices of twentieth century which she perhaps, like many other individuals, chose to silence. In exposing the dictatorship littering the Eastern European, Fouchè becomes concerned with a central thread of contemporary literature – human rights. In an interview with Bill Moyers, she notes that the colonel’s actions were his …show more content…

Derived from the Latin word ‘columna’, meaning column, it is so named because a mid-rank officer originally headed the first column or a regiment. The title appears to speak directly to the form of the poem; which is portrayed as a thick, dark column centred neatly on a clinically white page with the upright officer infront. Furthermore, in hearing the title it triggers an association to a word with a much darker connotation – colonialism. Thereby harkening back to a time in which the human body was brutally violated and tortured. The title thus takes its rightful place standing upright above a dark body of words, proving crucial to the poem’s thematic purpose. An ominous foreshadowing is therefore set from the start and continues throughout in minor disturbing details of the colonel’s ordinary, domestic home, sticking out like lifted bricks on a smooth path, these horrifying details cause one to stumble over them in disarray. Fouchè’s use of capitalisation in the first sentence introduces a confessional tone by proclaiming a truth of our contemporary previously contested. In doing so she not only invites the reader to listen but implicates us in this truth through the use of personal pronouns which continue

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