Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems brings together in English translation eight of the longer poems by Nicaragua's impassioned Marxist priest, Ernesto Cardenal, described in the Times Literary Supplement as the outstanding socially committed poet of his generation in Spanish America." His work, like Pablo Neruda's, is unabashedly political; like Ezra Pound's, his poems demonstrate history on an epic scale - but the voice is all his own and speaks from the heart of a land sunk for generations in poverty, oppression, and turmoil. As both activist and contemplative, Cardenal maintained strong ties with the Sandinist guerillas while at the same time living a form of primitive Christianity at his religious settlement of Our Lady of Solentiname on an island in Lake Nicaragua. In late 1977, amid increasing civil violence, the Nicaraguan National Guard utterly destroyed the Solentiname community, and Cardenal fled to neighboring Costa Rica, where he continued his efforts on behalf of the revolutionary movement. With the final collapse of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, he returned to Nicaragua as his country's new Minister of Culture. Spanning a quarter century, the poemsin Zero Hour constitute a vivid record of continuous struggle against flagrant exploitation and brutal indifference to common humanity. "

Cardenal, Apocalypse and Other Poems. Poems for revolution.

The most comprehensive selection of poems in English by Latin America's legendary poet-activist, Ernesto Cardenal.

A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this was not the country, they used a steel arch with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this was a modern event, the trees were not involved. —from "Blue Front" Martha Collins's father, as a five-year-old, sold fruit outside the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909. What he witnessed there, with 10,000 participants, is shocking. In Blue Front, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence—newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations about her father's own experience. The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.

A Jewish girl and the daughter of a Nazi have been best friends since they started school, but in 1938 the 13-year-olds find their close relationship difficult to maintain.