A plenitude of poetry.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Books

Given By Wendell Berry Shoemaker Hoard. 152 pages. $22. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan Foreword by Adrienne Rich Copper Canyon. 649 pages. $40. Jack and Other New Poems By Maxine Kumin Norton. 112 pages. $23.95. The War Works Hard By Dunya Mikhail New Directions. 78 pages. $13.95. You & Yours By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions. 84 pages. $15.50. No Heaven By Alicia Suskin Ostriker Pittsburgh. 136pages. $12.95. My Nature Is Hunger New and Selected Poems: 1989-2004. By Luis J. Rodriguez Curbstone. 149 pages. $14.95. A plenitude of poetry ushers forth each year, with the slender shoulders of the newcomers jostling against the greats on the bookstore shelves. I took my annual tour of those shelves, and have come away again impressed by the quality and range that contemporary poetry has to offer.

I'm drawn to those poets who engage in some way with politics. And in 2005, a year shadowed by the Iraq War, I turned especially to poets who got out the chalk to sketch it.

The poet Jimmy Santiago Boca once said that no leader should be allowed to invade another country until he could name a poet and a novelist and a singer from that country. This brings me to The War Works Hard, an urgent book by Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet who served as the literary editor of The Baghdad Observer but then fled Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1990s, eventually settling in the United States.

In her first poem, "Bag of Bones," she slaps her readers awake with her opening lines about a mass graveyard: "What good luck!/She has found his bones."

The title poem continues in this sardonic vein:

 How magnificent the war is! How eager and efficient! Early in the morning, it wakes up the sirens and dispatches ambulances

to various places, swings corpses through the air, rolls stretchers to the wounded, summons rain from the eyes of mothers.

Her praise for the diligent war, which "entertains the gods/shooting fireworks and missiles/into the sky" and "paints a smile on the leader's face," ought to enter the anthologies of peace poems.

Several of Mikhail's most powerful poems relate to her immigrant experience. In "America," the narrator fends off questions from an immigration officer. "Please don't ask me, America/I don't remember," the poem begs. "Stop your questioning, America/and offer your hand."

"I Was in a Hurry" resonates, as well. "Yesterday, I lost a country/I was in a hurry/and didn't notice when it fell from me," Mikhail begins, adding later...