When Doves Cry

"Shove the world into a couplet"

Sáenz's Dreaming the End of War is perhaps most directly relevant to our current moment. A former Catholic priest, this poet creates prayerful verse that is at once mystical and utterly human. In a series of "dreams," he investigates the very origins of human conflict: These meditations, which take place in the stark desert borderland between Mexico and the United States (in turn a metaphor for the borders between consciousness and unconsciousness and the corporeal and spiritual worlds), posit a primal tendency to divide ourselves. Sáenz also crosses the boundary between the personal and the political, recognizing in his own experiences the seeds of violence that he so abhors in U.S. government policies. He goes so far as to question poetry's capacity for mediating such profound discord:

I live in the century of aesthetics.

Though I can take a thought and dress it up

Then take it out to eat, and then pretend

That alexandrine couplets are my friends;

Alone, my thoughts are wrinkled and unpressed,

And I take my clothes off so I can rest --

My thoughts are more important than the dress.

Though I can take a word and make it rhyme,

I cannot shove the world into a couplet.

Ultimately, Sáenz critiques the notion that poetry is not a suitable container for political outrage; the almost mocking, sing-song feeling of these lines contrasts ironically with nearly all the rest of the book, which consists of fragmented, unrhymed, explosive language, plainly emblematic of the brokenness of our war-ravaged Earth. If poetry can save us, he implies, it must be a poetry free of artifice and politeness.

The most compelling section of the book is the last, in which Sáenz achieves a kind of reconciliation among his warring inner selves and, on a larger scale, comes to grips with his identity as a Mexican American, his relative success and what he has experienced as a citizen of what he sees as an oppressive, warmongering country. Weaving together the salient presences from the previous 11 poems -- including his lost childhood dog, the anonymous illegal immigrants who die trying to cross the Rio Grande, the animals we exploit that in Mexican folklore await us in the afterlife -- he creates a kind of resurrection in lines that evoke the cleansing ritual of baptism; the hope for peace lies in the empathetic identification with the other, as embodied in the entirely innocent love we receive from our pets, which carries the poet -- who has become the illegal, hated "everyman" immigrant -- across the border to safety.