Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, June 17, 2007; BW12

Anton Chekhov and Mark Twain are among the artists who studied the craft of writing while working as journalists. Willa Cather and Langston Hughes, too, met deadlines. The demands of concision, clarity and accuracy helped develop their gifts. But a poem reports about something different from news, even when the material is similar. That distinction is clear when a superb reporter such as Eliza Griswold, who has covered Afghanistan, Africa and Guantánamo, also excels as a poet.

MONKEY

The soldiers are children and the monkey's young.

He clings to my leg, heart against calf --

a throat filling, refilling with blood.

Last week, the children ate his mother --

dashed her head against the breadfruit.

A young girl soldier laughs,

tears the baby from my leg

and hurls him toward the tree.

See, she says, you have to be rough.

When she was taken, the girl's

heart too pulsed in her throat.

This plain, declarative manner is "reportorial," but along with that directness each line creates overtones and undertones: for instance, the deceptive parallelism of "children" and "young"; the disorientation of "heart against calf," with its echo of "heart against head"; the way "throat," "heart" and "blood" suggest the poet's body or feelings, along with the animal's; the implied, ghost-sentence "child ate his mother"; the way "too" in the last line could include the poet's heart and throat, as well as the girl's and the monkey's.

In a similar, more overt way, these poems sometimes bring personal relationships into the context of hardship and violence, or vice versa.

THE POLITICS OF DREAMS

The hooded men run

through the daytime streets,

anonymous, wreaking

havoc -- the hoods

designed to contain them

can be seen out of but not

into, like smoked glass.

They are against us

and to save ourselves

we string them by the dozen

upside down -- hooded,

trussed and writhing.

Some die, which is a relief.

After the hanging, there's

no letting them go.

You asked me what I dreamt of.

Now you know.

Ordinary phrases like "which is a relief" and "now you know" gain extraordinary power in these artful, heartbreaking poems.

(Eliza Griswold's poems are from her book "Wideawake Field." Farrar Straus Giroux. Copyright 2007 by Eliza Griswold.)

Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States

from 1997 through 2000.