Poetry Like Bread: An Anthology of Political Poets.

Edited by Martin Espada Curbstone Press. 288 pp. $12.95, paper.

Let me serve a feast of poetry. There's so much rich, diverse, and invigorating political poetry being published that it's hard to keep up, but to give you a sample, I'd like to present three emergent poets, along with two new works by old favorites.

Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada is an immensely talented practitioner of traditional political poetry: direct, detailed, crisp. His latest work, City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, covers urban poverty in America, the plight of Central American refugees, and U.S. domination of Puerto Rico. But Espada, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is not heavy-handed or hortatory, for he relies on autobiographical vignettes to pin his message.

In "Coca-Cola and Coco Frio," Espada recounts his first boyhood visit to Puerto Rico, "island of family folklore." He could not get over that "people drank Coca-Cola" there "while so many coconuts in the trees/sagged heavy with milk, swollen/and unsuckled."

He continues his education in "The Year I Was Diagnosed with a Sacrilegious Heart." The poem begins: "At twelve/I quit reciting the Pledge of Allegiance/ could not salute the flag." At assembly, when the color guard would march, "I stuck to my seat/like a back pocket snagged on coil."

Espada eventually became a legal-services lawyer in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and his poems about his work are among the most vivid and arresting in this book. In "Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper," Espada writes of working as a teenager in a plant that made legal pads. "Ten years later, in law school,/I knew that every legal pad/was glued with the sting of hidden cuts."

But in most of the lawyer poems, Espada is not the central character, only a foil for the poor and the refugees who are being mercilessly evicted. He writes of a callous judge, who "puffed up/his robes/ like a black bird/shaking off rain" when siding with a landlord who conceded there are rodents in the apartment of Espada's Salvadoran client. The tenant, not the landlord, was the defendant in this case; his offense--having tires in the hallway. The judge orders the tenant to remove the tires. "You don't live in a jungle/anymore. This/is a civilized country."

Espada's beleaguered, outgunned tenants haunt him: "I cannot evict them/from my insomniac nights, tenants in the city of coughing and dead radiators." He knows too well that their most elemental needs go unmet. "They fold hands over plates/to protect food/from ceilings black with roaches."

Espada, by the way, is the editor of the new release poetry like bread. This urgent collection includes the work of thirty-three poets, including some familiar ones--Maragaret Randall, Jimmy Santiago Baco, Ernesto Cardenal--but also many less familiar ones whose work also stands out, such as Kevin Bowen, Leo Connellan, and Teresa De Jesus. With an emphasis on resisting repression in Latin America, the anthology contains many poems given both in their original Spanish and in English translation. Other subjects include the rights of Native Americans, and the condition of the poor in the United States. Unlike Carolyn Forche's important anthology last year, Against Forgetting, this one has a broader tone and is less depressing: These are poems not so much of witness and survival as of defiance and resistance. That they all came from one small press alone suggests the plenitude of late Twentieth Century political poetry. The title comes from "Like You," by Roque Dalton, the influential Latin American poet who died in 1975: "I believe the world is beautiful/ and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone."