Sandinista Poetics

127 reviews the poliltically committed; Forche, the undecided or less politically committed. Denise Levertov, in a blurb for 77ie Country Between Us, wrote that Forche "is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political, lyrical and engaged." That is not quite right. Forché's lyrical voice is here one of engagement, though without any political program (offered or implied solution). There is poUitical relevancy but the concern is not political. Indeed, Forche has charcterized the intensifying "prolonged popular war" in El Salvador as "the most hopeless of revolutions," yet even in such a context she is impelled by her moral sesibility (grounded in a Catholic upbringing to protest exploitation and other abuses of human rights. She appears ready, to borrow a phrase from Terence Des Pres' 77ie Survivor , "to face the worst straight-on, without sentiment or hope, simply to keep watch over life." (Des Pres is himself in part the subject of "Ourselves or Nothing.") 77ie Country Between Us concludes with the options, as Forche sees them, clearly outlined: There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish. It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing. Forché's language gives us instances of magnificence, but the poems themselves are uneven. In "Expatriate," she chides a young American for living a self-consciously poetic Efe in Turkey— a life of exotic setttings rather than inward need or consequence, yet several of her poems, especially in the middle section, carry a similar fault. Too often there is a genuflection to writing workshop diction and tone, and evidence of the self-consciously exotic or erotic without basis, which dilute the intention of the poems in question. And occasionally her images are imprecise: "your breath/hanging about your face like tobacco" (does she mean "like tobacco smoke"?). "For the Stranger" ends with a thematic cliché ("We have, each of us, notiiing./We will give it to each other.")—simply one more variation of W.S. Merwin's "What you do not have you find everywhere," though Forché's lines are ambiguous enough for one to argue that they're a necessary communal gesture. (Readers might want to compare Scully's "Isa Mar" with Forché's "The Island," especially the opening stanzas, tone, and development of each. The similarities are, at the very least, coincidental [Santiago Poems originally appeared in 1975].) But Forché's overall strategy is ambitious, and the cumulative effect of her volume is substantial. Both 77ie Country Between Us and Sanliage Poems are cohesive books of poems, rather than merely collections, and that in itselfis rare today. These are impressive documents of a particular time and place. They will be relevant well into the future. ROGER GAESS SANDINISTA POETICS This is a review of the small corpus of books and journals which offer the Englishlanguage reader a sample of the sort of poetry that is being produced by the Central American revolution, particularly in Nicaragua and El Salvador. They are: Roque Dalton, Poetry andMilitancy in Latin America, edited by James Scully as #1 of his Art On The Line 128 the minnesota review series (Curbstone Press, 1981); Roque DaIton, "Poems," translated by Edward Baker in Social Text 5 (spring, 1982); Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hourand OtherDocumentary Poems, edited by Robert Pring-Mill (New Directions, 1980); collective anthology by Bridget Aldaraca, Ed Baker, Ileana Rodriquez and Marc Zimmerman titled Nicaragua in Revolution : The Poets Speak (Marxist Educational Press, 1980); and VoicesfromNicaragua, I, #1 (1982), a new journal edited by Marc Zimmerman. I include some remarks apropos of Robert Stome's A Flagfor Sunrise also. Poetry has a different specific gravity in countries like Nicaragua, which is the same as saying that it has a different class referent, a different relation to history. There is a scene in the second part of Lucia where the young lovers, she working to organize a union in her factory, he a revolutionary terrorist, recite verses of Martito each other. That was an idyllic moment in the brutal struggle they were engaged in; but it was...