What good are more poems?

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Fire and Ink: An Anthology Of Social Action Writing, Cry Wolf, This Side of Early and The Mind-Body Problem: Poems - Book review

Fire and Ink: An Anthology Of Social Action Writing

Edited by Frances Payne Adler, Debra Busman, and Diana Garcia

University of Arizona Press. 480 pages. $32.95.

Cry Wolf

By Doug Anderson

Azul Editions. 30 pages. $5.

This Side of Early

By Naomi Ayala

Curbstone Press. 68 pages. $13.95.

The Mind-Body Problem: Poems

By Katha Pollitt

Random House. 82 pages. $23.

W . H Auden was my first love. If I could trade in my hole professional life just to be him in 1939 (or Robert La Follette in 1917, for that matter), I'd do it in a flash. Auden combined the discipline and art of poetry with social commitment: "All I have is a voice/to undo the folded lie."

Since reading Auden in college, I've looked for poets who use their voices in this way. Over the last fifteen years, we've been bringing some of them to you, once a month, in the pages of The Progressive .

Many of them now reappear in a terrific new collection called Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing . Martín Espada is here, and so is Marilyn Chin, Paolo Corso, Alicia Ostriker, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Mahmoud Darwish, whose "House Murdered" may be the best poem we've ever published. Here's a sample:

"Houses get murdered just as their residents get murdered. And as the memory of things murdered--wood, stone, glass, iron, cement--they all scatter in fragments like beings."

There are lots of other towering poets here, like June Jordan and Adrienne Rich, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Dennis Brutus, Carolyn Forché and Sharon Olds, and many, many more.

But this is an anthology not just of poetry but of powerful prose and interviews, too. The book includes essays by Gloria Anzaldúa, Juan Felipe Herrera, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Gary Soto, and Alice Walker, to name a few. And two Progressive interviews are on display: Anne-Marie Cusac's with Sam Hamill, and David Barsamian's with Arundhati Roy.

You'll find a lot of inspiration and wisdom here. One essay by Thich Nhat Hanh cautions us that raising our voice is not enough: "To educate people for peace, we can use words or we can speak with our lives."

A nthologies are great, but I like to snuggle with a single poet sometimes. I want to hear the voice. I want to feel the passion. I want to soak in the images and detect the tropes. I want to watch for the hummingbird of surprise that darts off the page. And so I've picked out three recent books of poems that please me in all these ways.

The first, This Side of Early , is by Naomi Ayala. In...