Birds of poetry.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Book Review

American Smooth By Rita Dove W. W. Norton. 143 pages. $22.95.

Citizen By Andrew Feld Perennial. 75 pages. $12.95.

The Shadow's Horse By Diane Glancy University of Arizona Press. 58 pages. $15.95.

The School Among the Ruins By Adrienne Rich W. W. Norton. 113 pages. $22.95.

Buffalo Head Solos By Tim Seibles Cleveland State University. 132 pages. $16.

Madness and Retribution By Juliette Torrez Manic Press. 77 pages. $12. 95.

Over the holidays, I took a week's vacation in poetry, enjoying the condensed form, the spun phrase, the out-of-nowhere image.

I'm attracted to it all, but especially to engaged poetry, work that tangles with America or soars above us and spots the glaring error as well as the beauty.

Fortunately, we have two magnificent frigate birds among us, Adrienne Rich and Rita Dove, who are masters at this.

In Rich's latest work, The School Among the Ruins, Bush's Iraq War repeatedly intrudes. Here, for instance, is from "Wait":

sand screams against your government issued tent hell's noise in your nostrils crawl into your ear-shell wrap yourself in no-thought wait no place for the little lyric. This book is an ode to solidarity and defiance, and the power of the word: "word and body/are all we have to lay on the line."

All this we've come to expect from Rich, who over a lifetime has devoted herself to laying it on the line. But also to love, lesbian love, which she evokes in subtle, beautiful ways.

Sleeping with you after weeks apart how normal yet after midnight to turn and slide my arm along your thigh drawn up in sleep what delicate amaze. The verses Rich dedicates to June Jordan, the poet, essayist, activist, and teacher, who used to write for The Progressive, especially moved me. "The world's quiver and shine/I'd clasp for you forever," Rich writes.

Rich gives her gift of words to us, not knowing ultimately what will become of them or us ("words of the poets tumble/into the shuddering stream"), but hopeful that someone will be on the receiving end to revive this "moribund democracy."

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winner, offers in American Smooth an astonishing collection that covers race, music, dance, the quality of contentedness in a good marriage, practice at a shooting range, and, like Rich, the power of the word: "We put our thoughts out there on the cosmos express/and they hurtle on, tired and frightened."

The poems on race have a particular urgency. In "Brown," she writes:

For once I was not the only black person in the...