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Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, BOA Editions, Limited, 2000

Nguyen Duy, Distant Road: Selected Poems of Nguyen Duy, Curbstone Press, 1999

Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995

Grace Paley, Begin Again: Collected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

When people talk about the social value of contemporary poetry, the discussion often boils down to a pair of opposing claims. On the one side is the heartfelt sense that too much of our poetry is not political enough, is mired in the merely personal, is hiding its head in the quicksands of the solipsistic and the self-indulgent. On the other side one hears a counter-argument on behalf of the personal, especially those affirmations of personhood in social contexts where the individual is systematically bloodied and ground down. The debate oscillates endlessly between the political and the personal, even though everyone involved knows that somehow those categories are far too simple. Everyone intuits, from direct experience, that the best poetry is always somehow both personal and political.

One of the most valuable conceptual resolutions of this debate can be found in Seamus Heaney's recent essay, "The Redress of Poetry." In this essay he acknowledges that the times often demand that poetry point out and redress evident social wrongs. This, says Heaney, is one "redress of poetry," but he also acknowledges that there is another kind of redress that poetry can offer. It is the redress that comes from affirming poetry as its own particular way of knowing and being. It is the redress that comes from the creation of an imagined response to the pressures of reality, what Heaney calls a "satisfactory comeback by the mind to the facts of the matter." The poem, understood this way, serves less a reportorial role and more a "counterweighting function." The work of the poem then is to place "a counter-reality in the scales," and if it works well, then "the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our experience."

Heaney's way of imagining the social usefulness of poetry as poetry came to my mind this summer when I read Nguyen Duy's Distant Road, recently published by Curbstone Press. Duy is one of the most prominent of contemporary Vietnamese poets, and this book presents us with a generous selection of his life's work, beautifully and carefully translated by Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen. Duy began writing poetry while in the North Vietnamese Army during the years of the American war, and many of his poems give us vivid glimpses of what it was like to live under the B-52s. But there is no triumphalism or jingoism in Duy's poetry. Instead there is immense sadness about the cost of war, the human disaster that it was, even for those who felt most justified in waging it. In short, what seems to govern all of Duy's poetry is the effort of his mind at making "a comeback to the facts of the matter" of having been born in the midst of a long, anti-colonial war.

For example, in "The Morning After the War Was Over," Duy tells us that on that auspicious day, the entire universe seemed dissolved into mists and fog. Roads disappeared, lamplights cast strange shadows, and in such an atmosphere, says Duy, "You move softly step by step,/ easily, as if it were nothing at all." The lines first of all convey some pleasure in walking without fear, perhaps for the first time in many years. Simultaneously, however, they also suggest something of the felt uncertainty in "winning," an intuition of the difficulties that would indeed confront the Vietnamese people in 1975. On the morning after the war was over, the path was not automatically clear. Or, in the more explicit words of a later poem that Duy wrote after a visit to bullet-scarred Ankor Wat in 1989: "In the end, in every war,/whoever won, the people always lost." This is less a political thesis, but instead in its context is a sad, lyrical truth, one that Heaney might call a counterweight. Such intuited truths help us see more broadly, and feel more deeply, than whatever official version of reality prevails at a given moment. The poem, says Heaney, "has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated."

This project of forging "a match" for a complex social reality puts me in mind of another recent book of poetry, Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, published by BOA Edition, Limited. In this book is a most remarkable and moving short poem: "jasper texas 1998." It is dedicated to James Byrd, the African American who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. How does one write about such an outrage? How does one even begin to approach how one "feels" about it? What could any poem offer a reader? Clifton, herself an African American, decided to make a leap of imagination. Her poem is in the voice of the murdered man, his separated head speaking out of the depths of his despair and disgust. "why and why and why/ should i call a white man brother?" says the voice of the poem, "who is the human in this place, /the thing that is dragged or the dragger?" Of course this is "unrealistic" in any ordinary sense of realism. But there is no doubt that Clifton's leap helps her find and ask those hard questions about the platitudes of brotherhood and humanity.

Clifton's poetry invariably goes after the unsayable, the socially forbidden or that which otherwise seems impossible to say. Sometimes her work explores racist horrors, as above, but at other times it heads in the direction of an earthy, life-affirming feminism.

In "to my last period," a poem filled with an ebullient wit, she begins by saying, "well girl, goodbye." The personification and direct address to her period is her "comeback" to the mortal facts of aging. She ends the poem by saying,

now it is done

and I feel just like

the grandmothers who

after the hussy has gone,

sit holding her photograph

and sighing, wasn't she

beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

Heaney says that the counterweighting function of poetry allows the poem to become "another truth to which we can have recourse, before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way." This seems to be an apt description of how this poem and all of Clifton's poetry works.

And it is an equally apt way to describe Grace Paley's writing. One of the pre-eminent fiction writers of our time, and throughout her life profoundly committed to work on behalf of peace and social justice, Paley has always generated a steady undercurrent of poetry as part of her writing life. It is a poetry that has nothing in it of the prefabricated, bur rather is a poetry of surprise and delight, even if the surprises and delights must be woven into a fabric of sorrow or outrage. In her collected poems, Begin Again, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Paley records the "personal" story of her life, loves, family, and social concerns. But there is no doubt that her poems are motivated in part by the feminist axiom that the personal is political, and vice versa. If anything, one could say that in this poetry that connection is constantly being forged. For example, there is the wonderful set of poems she wrote during the Vietnam War, each of which is making connections between life in the war zone, and life back here in the States. In "Connections: Vermont Vietnam," the purpose of the poem is to widen the imaginative conception of the war. Over there, the poet says, is back here too.

Paley's poetry at its heart centers on the credibility and integrity of the voice she creates. As in her fiction, she is at times bitingly funny, at other times vulnerable and tender, but she is always astute at understanding how we all often avoid saying the inmost truth. Paley's ultimate achievement in the poems is, for me, a breathtakingly intimate and honest voice. Its ring of integrity, in an era when falsehood continues to dominate practically every form of public discourse, is itself a personal political statement.

In "Walking in the Woods," for example, Paley tells us of seeing an old maple, a couple of its arms cracked, half rotting. The tree is not really dying, she says, but just "living less widely." Its green head has to make "a terrible stretch" to reach the sunlight. Then comes one of those moments which makes one think the poet is at that moment discovering what she thinks and feels. With a little pause, Paley says, "but if you've/liked life you do it." There is a personal wisdom here, but there is a political truth too. If one cares enough about life, then you somehow strain toward it, to affirm it as best you can, even in the face of intractable forces. This poem's imaginative "comeback" to the mortal facts yields in the end to an image that defines the nature of commitment, in both the personal and the public dimensions of our lives.

Fred Marchant directs the creative writing program at Suffolk University, and is the author of Tipping Point, and a new book of poems, Full Moon Boat, forthcoming from Graywolf Press.