Haruko/Love Poems.

Another cause for celebration: June Jordan has just published haruko/ love poems, with a splendid foreword by Adrienne Rich. The first part this beautiful, gripping little book contains "The Haruko Poems 1991-1992," in which Jordan depicts her love for Haruko in all its stages: sensuous, tender, passionate, furious, bitter, and finally becalmed.

Jordan's "Postcript for Haruko: On War and Peace," is breathtaking, as this middle stanza shows:

So do we finally outlive the flare and flash

of flame and leaf and feathers violent

as waves that rise because they also fall

away and falling call the waters of the world

one name again.

Amid the glorious Haruko poems, Jordan sneaks in a powerful political punch entitled, "Why I became a pacifist/and then/How I became a warrior again." She lists eight reasons; here are three of them: "Because turning that other cheek ... because not throwing whoever calls me bitch/out the goddamn window . . . and because failing to sing my song/finally/finally/got on my absolute last nerve."

Why does she include this "political" poem in her love poems? Two answers come to mind: First, Jordan does not draw a chalk line between love and politics, and second, rejecting pacifism is an act of becoming true to herself, of loving herself, and only in loving herself is she capable of loving others. Thus, the last few lines read: "And I stay ready for war/because now I live ready for a whole lot more/than that."

The second section of the book is entitled "Selected Love Poems 1970-1991," and in them you can see Jordan stressing the importance of self love even as she opens to lovers of both sexes. In "Free Flight," she starts one stanza with "Maybe I need a woman," and then the next stanza with "Maybe I need a man." She ends the poem in typical Jordan style: "Maybe I just need to love myself myself and/anyway/I'm working on it."

This collection contains poems about the extermination of Native Americans, about racism in the United States and in South Africa, and about resistance, including a winning tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer ("one full Black lily/luminescent/in a homemade field/of love"). And it contains one of Jordan's anthems, "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies." Like her anti-pacifism poem, this one puts her oppressors--and bullies everywhere--on guard: "Be afraid./I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits/and facial tics." But even in this poem she makes room for love and nature, "impulse and realities/ (the blossoming flamingos of my/wild mimosa trees)."

Throughout the book, she extols the curative powers of love. "In your love I am sometimes redeemed/a stranger/to myself," she writes. This faith in love, self-knowledge, and defiant political action is what makes her work so empowering. Progressive.)