When Doves Cry

Political and personal poetry addresses the wider world.

DREAMING THE END OF WAR

By Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Copper Canyon. 68 pp. Paperback, $15

MAKING PEACE

By Denise Levertov

New Directions. 64 pp. Paperback, $9

A CARTOGRAPHY OF PEACE

By Jean L. Connor

Passager. 78 pp. Paperback, $13.95

Political poetry today is, as ever, a vexed enterprise. On one side are those who feel that poetry is no place for politics; they cleave to W.H. Auden's famous statement that "poetry makes nothing happen." But others interpret Auden entirely differently, citing some of his own more expressly political poetry, and declaring that the poetic impulse is inherently an activist one, a call to community engagement, a deeply empathetic gesture that demands we consider our human interrelationships on individual, societal and even global levels.

Great poets sit on both sides of this potentially charged divide: One thinks of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost and James Merrill as ostensibly apolitical poets, while June Jordan, Pablo Neruda and Muriel Rukeyser immediately come to mind as writers whose social consciousness is more explicit. In the United States, the debate over the purpose of poetry has only become more heated in recent decades, when poets have called attention to themselves by opposing the wars in Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq. Just a few years back, a small group of American poets created a stir (and garnered more media attention than poetry is used to receiving) by, in protest of her husband's Iraq policy, refusing Laura Bush's invitation to attend a poetry symposium she planned to host at the White House. Now known as "Poets Against War," they have grown into an important grassroots pacifist movement, organizing dissident readings and posting on their well-trafficked Web site (www.poets againstthewar.org) hundreds of antiwar poems.

As I read these three collections of poems -- Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Dreaming the End of War , Denise Levertov's posthumous Making Peace and Jean L. Connor's A Cartography of Peace -- I was most struck by the rich diversity of voices in American poetry, which itself seems emblematic of our nation's greatness. Taken together, these books are not so much an argument against war as they are testimony to our abiding desire for peace. These poets, even at their angriest moments, ask questions rather than impose beliefs; in their invitation to dialogue, even at its most provocative, we find compassion (for wounded soldiers and their families, for innocent civilian casualties, even for the reviled enemy), which is precisely the opposite of what most who espouse fundamentalism and terrorism seek to incite in us.