The Preface to a volume of poems by Ernesto Cardenal, entitled Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, says bluntly about the poet that he "is a Catholic Priest and a Marxist poet, and he sees no conflict between these two loyalties." And the poems in this volume, long works that read in English like amalgams of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg, amply demonstrate the fusion in his mind of these two institutions, the Church of Rome and the Leninist dogmas of atheistic dialectical materialism, two mirror opposites in philosophy as well as in the real world. Or, if not opposites, then contraries, as William Blake would have put it. Of course, appearances may be misleading: the Catholic Church has an almost two thousand-year history of practical organization of society, of many diverse societies and cultures in fact, of missionary work and conversion of unbelievers...