Poetry can save us.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Book review

The Trouble Ball

By Martin Espada

Norton. 66 pages. $24.95.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010

By Adrienne Rich

Norton. 89 pages. $24.95.

Inside the Money Machine

By Minnie Bruce Pratt

Carolina Wren Press. 85 pages. $15.95.

After a terrible week in Wisconsin, after every branch of state government had scratched our eyes and slashed our backs, I took refuge in several new books of poetry by old favorites of mine.

Martin Espada was the first to comfort me with a phenomenal collection of twenty-four poems entitled The Trouble Ball. Here Espada reaches beyond his favorite pitch in his previous works, which relied on a magically redemptive curve at the end of many of his poems, and delivers instead the hard stuff.

The title poem revolves around the first Major League baseball game his father saw at Ebbets Field. Hoping to see Satchel Paige, he was disappointed and asked, in Spanish, "Where are the Negro players?" Espada's grandfather told his dad: "No los dejan"--"They don't let them play here. " That's all Espada's dad remembers about the day, the poet tells us.

Espada blows other vivid personal stories by us, several about growing up as a Puerto Rican kid in Brooklyn. One, entitled "People Like Us Are Dangerous," begins:

In Brooklyn days, I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz, lightweight champion of the world from Ponce, Puerto Rico. Says the narrator: "I wanted to be a pugilist with clever hands." But Ortiz develops a drinking problem, quits boxing, and ends up driving

a cab on graveyard shift to keep away from all the bars on the avenue far from the backslappers who wanted to buy the champ a drink. In one of the book's most tender poems, "His Hands Have Learned What Cannot Be Taught," Espada writes about his wife, who is having a seizure.

My son, not yet seventeen, leans across the table and shuts her eyelids with the V of his fingers. Seeing this, Espada concludes, with every parent's wish: "Now I can leave the table."

He ends the first section of this book with two powerful poems set in Chile that contend with torture. Haunting is "The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi." Espada describes the guards entertaining their families even amidst the brutalities the officers are committing. It's not a pretty poem, but pretty isn't what Espada is after.

He's after the truth. And he hustles for it in the second half of the book, entitled "Blasphemy," with a poem by the same name. It begins with the line: "Let the blasphemy be spoken...