Roque Dalton Critical Essay | Critical Review by Chris Searle

Critical Review by Chris Searle

SOURCE: A review of Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, in Race and Class, Vol. 39, No. 2, October-December, 1997, pp. 85-87.

In the following review, Searle praises Dalton's “poetic genius.”

I first met the poetry of Roque Dalton of El Salvador during the late 1970s, at the height of the national liberation struggle of that tiny nation's people. I remember, in particular, the poem that imagined communism as an aspirin as big as the sun. A stunning image, I thought, recalling Donne's compasses and Marvell's chariot—is this an authentic Latin American metaphysical poet?

He is, but as the collection of his poems, Small Hours of the Night, shows us, he is much more too. Revolutionary, lyrical love poet, patriot, humorist—and, as he called himself,

                                                                                                    a hack in the smallest Communist Party in the world.

He came from dramatic family circumstances. His father was one...
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