City of Coughing and Dead Radiators.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

By Martin Espada W.W. Norton. 89 pp. $17.95, cloth.

Let me serve a feast of poetry. There's so much rich, diverse, and invigorating political poetry being published that it's hard to keep up, but to give you a sample, I'd like to present three emergent poets, along with two new works by old favorites.

Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada is an immensely talented practitioner of traditional political poetry: direct, detailed, crisp. His latest work, City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, covers urban poverty in America, the plight of Central American refugees, and U.S. domination of Puerto Rico. But Espada, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is not heavy-handed or hortatory, for he relies on autobiographical vignettes to pin his message.

In "Coca-Cola and Coco Frio," Espada recounts his first boyhood visit to Puerto Rico, "island of family folklore." He could not get over that "people drank Coca-Cola" there "while so many coconuts in the trees/sagged heavy with milk, swollen/and unsuckled."

He continues his education in "The Year I Was Diagnosed with a Sacrilegious Heart." The poem begins: "At twelve/I quit reciting the Pledge of Allegiance/ could not salute the flag." At assembly, when the color guard would march, "I stuck to my seat/like a back pocket snagged on coil."

Espada eventually became a legal-services lawyer in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and his poems about his work are among the most vivid and arresting in this book. In "Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper," Espada writes of working as a teenager in a plant that made legal pads. "Ten years later, in law school,/I knew that every legal pad/was glued with the sting of hidden cuts."

But in most of the lawyer poems, Espada is not the central character, only a foil for the poor and the refugees who are being mercilessly evicted. He writes of a callous judge, who "puffed up/his robes/ like a black bird/shaking off rain" when siding with a landlord who conceded there are rodents in the...