N.B. Every month I’ll be reading and reviewing 2 poetry collections from across the world in sub-500 words. Below each review will be a list of which poems I found to be the collection’s most compelling, some with hyperlinks if they appear online anywhere.

Kristina Dimitrova’s A Visit To The Clockmaker

Society doesn’t exist in Kristen Dimitrova’s poetry. Even “the local school” in her 2005 collection, A Visit To The Clockmaker, translated by Gregory O’Donoghue, is a miniature of “I,” misspelled graffiti, and “sturdy guys in sleeveless undershirts" playing football in front of said graffiti. But it wants to exist – these “sturdy guys” are playing with “the neighborhood football.” The neighborhood is in the football, not the guys. This is the double bind for a poet like Dimitrova whose abstracted yet sharp glancing poems are in essence parables for the flaneur.

Voyeurism is built into parable – how else to receive their messages besides people watching? – which is how Dimitrova takes them to this lonely place. A “pair” unadorned by any intimacy (“only the fire/unites them/& it will not light”) feed their fire paper, wait for it to settle, then light it:

But not too near

Because in order

To stay together

They must not succeed.

What can be said about people in a society whose only connection is football or fire? What can be said of the society whose success requires its failure to thrive? This was a pressing question when Bulgaria had only become independent of the Soviet structure 15 years prior to the collection’s publication. It’s truthfully a perennial question for any nation whose history flows between borders, hegemons, and ideologies. Often we think of poets as planchettes for the national spirit. What if the dead haven’t died? Can’t die?

Dimitrova’s is the region which gave us vampires, demons so terrifying it desecrated graves. In the belief that a plain wooden joist, sharpened to a point, could end a reign of terror is a Dimitrovan parable about the end of society itself – or, what amounts to the same thing, the discovery that this society had always been a corpse awaiting the stake. Which is what Dimitrova offers in her pointed poems. Having watched the pair from afar, the poet comes over to the fire (but not too near): “I add this sheet of paper.”

Favorite Poems:

“Searching For An Answer”

“The Border”

“A Solemn Trip To The Family Roots”

“I Am A Bad Warder”

“Beliefs”

“The Loving Husband”

“About the Fire”

“A Visit to the Clockmaker”

Roque Dalton’s Stories And Poems of a Class Struggle

If revolutions are filled with contradictions (look no further than slavers fighting to be “a free people” in 1776), so are their actors. Roque Dalton bears this out in the posthumously published Stories and Poems of A Class Struggle, translated by Jack Hirschman and Babaria Paschke in 2023, 40 years after his comrades assassinated him; in one of three introductions, Christopher Soto notes how Dalton, a Communist guerilla during the Salvadoran Civil War, “is a poet who did not live the revolution in theory but in violent praxis.” Violent indeed. But besides violence is humor, romance — as with swashbucklers and war stories — which is a central difficulty in being “the enemy poet” in the only three paths for poets in relationship to the bourgeoisie in Dalton’s opening “Declaration of Principles”: to engage in disciplined just war without abandoning an artform associated with decadence. It was such a contradiction (and risk) that he broke apart into five pseudonymous voices.

This is baldly stated in “Poetic Art 1974” when he writes (as Timoteo Lue) “Poetry/Forgive me for having helped you understand/you’re not made of words alone.” Dalton begins in a “Sing, O Muse” register as if talking to a comrade, from this camaraderie ending the implied hierarchy between poet and art; he, too, is not just these names. How can a materialist write poetry, might be a question by those critics Jaime Barba notes in his introduction “described Stories and Poems as decadent and pamphleteering.” Maybe that’s the point for Dalton who (as Luis Luna) calls practice “mother of truth” in “Two Poems on Urban Buses.” It’s decadent for the clown or servant, the other two paths for a poet, but the enemy poet sees “the denaturalizing effect that capitalism has on things and their human uses” and seeks to reclaim poetry as a thing with use value. 

That’s why the poems are extremely simple. These are “pamphleteering” in the most literal way — easy to memorize, write, recite, digest, and transmit to a majority of a population that lacked literacy at the time Dalton joined the Communist Party in 1957 and was run by a Salvadoran military abetting American coffee interests. As he gibes about the bourgeoisie, “those who vote in El Salvador/for the president-elect of the United States.” What’s striking about his poetry, however, isn’t whether it’s “decadent” or “materialist”; poetry has always been excess that flows out of history. “Sing, O Muse” is the product of a European oral culture using myth metaphor to perpetuate a war story. It persists partly because the conditions that gave rise to it linger as remainders, partly because all history is an extension from what is done to what will be done. The best pamphleteering promises revolution poetry from the future, which Marx knew.

“You have to round it off with a little machete,” Dalton says of his El Salvador’s “thousand rough edges.”  It’s a romantic image for a man of “violent praxis” — poetry is a machete you must swing.

Favorite Poems:

Third Poem of Love

Poetic Art 1974

Like the Everlasting

Like You

Divine Victory

Moral on the Tool

Advice That Is No Longer Necessary Anywhere in the World but Here in El Salvador...

Parable Beginning with Revisionist Vulcanology

Rhymes on National History

The Bourgeoisie

[Or find most of the poems here]