Zapata's Disciple: Essays.

Zapata's Disciple: Essays by Martin Espada South End Press. 144 pages. $14.00 (paper).

Too often these days, even some of the best prose written by poets is apt to take up innocuous or even banal subjects--bleary-eyed reflections on the natural world, for example, or solipsistic tracts on the state of the tiny fiefdom of poetry. Few take on the life-and-death issues of American society at large. Martin Espada is one who courageously does. True to the poet's most indispensable role as mirror of our collective conscience, Espada has written a book of essays that resists the impulses to prettify or to look away. In Zapata's Disciple, the reader finds an angry poet whose tongue speaks over threats that it be ripped out, an intelligent poet whose taste is for the coarse bread of the downtrodden over "the perfect brie" of a self-absorbed young wannabe whose work he encounters while judging a national poetry competition. Espada's book reminds us with its every indelible page why poetry must matter.

He intermingles his own political poetry with a fascinating account of the origins of his work and its current pleasures and frustrations. In the essay "Postcard from the Empire of Queen Ixolib," we learn that his father, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican man, was jailed after refusing to sit in the back of a bus as he crossed the South on his return home on leave from the military nearly fifty years ago. Espada describes taking a pilgrimage back to Biloxi, Mississippi, the site of his father's mistreatment. There he finds the jail and the bus station demolished and paved over with a bustling New South of glitzy casinos, glib city officials coexisting oddly with preserved antebellum mansion-shrines to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and to the colorful (but segregated) Mardi Gras celebrations of yore.

Espada's gift for seeing metaphors for our common humanity in such experiences is startling. He draws unexpected parallels between his own initial disbelief at what happened to his father and Biloxi's attempts to selectively erase its past. Even as he despises the racism that abetted his father's tormentors, he stops short of vilifying the people of Biloxi and recognizes a shared, all-too-human reluctance to remember.

It is upon this foundation that Espada builds his hopes for a better world: one informed by poetry's ability to forge such empathic connections. In another memorable essay, "The Puerto Rican Dummy and the Merciful Son," he offers a stunning response to his wife's many years of back pain that began with an injury inflicted by her abusive father. He notes that when she becomes pregnant with their son, the backache gets worse. His response is to write a poem that honors her strength and celebrates her triumphant power. Thus, he alchemically transforms her suffering into beauty.

"White Birch" begins:

   Two decades ago rye whiskey
   scalded your father's throat,
   stinking from the mouth
   as he stamped his shoe
   in the groove between your hips,
   dizzy flailing cartwheel down the stairs.

   The tail of your spine split,
   became a scraping hook.
   For twenty years a fire raced
   across the boughs of your bones,
   his drunken mouth a movie
   flashing with every stabbed gesture.

After a stanza placing her in the hospital during delivery, and a flashback to her rural upbringing in "a town of white birches," Espada concludes the poem with the following two stanzas:

   Then the white birch of your bones,
   resilient and yielding, yielded again,
   root snapped as the boy spilled out of
   you
   into hands burst open by beckoning
   and voices pouring praise like water,
   two beings tangled in exhaustion,
   blood painted, but full of breath.

   After a generation of burning
   the hook unfurled in your body,
   the crack in the bone dissolved:
   One day you stood, expected again
   the branch of nerves
   fanning across your back to flame,
   and felt only the grace of birches.

Espada is at his heartwrenching best here, his poetry a tense, sometimes awkwardly painful, but ultimately healing bond that draws together wounded people, "blood painted, but full of breath." He demonstrates that poetry, like birth itself, may be one of the last ways to sustain hope in our damaged world.

Plainspoken and uncompromising, Martin Espada's book Zapata's Disciple is an invaluable contribution to the discourse on American identity. Lawyer, bartender, activist, Puerto Rican, father, American, socialist, New Yorker, independentista, teacher, and--most of all--poet, this earnest soul is indeed the worthy inheritor of resistance and revolution, as his title promises.

Poet and essayist Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of "The Other Man Was Me" (Arte Publico Press), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; "What the Body Told" (Duke University Press), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and "The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire" (W. W. Norton), which also won a Lambda Literary A ward.